I needed to get a certificate for digitally submitting my taxes. This, of course, requires me to set a password for it. The tax office’ web site lists a number of requirements and rejects any password that does not match those (so it said). So far, so good, the usual stuff, lower and upper case, numbers, special characters, minimum lenght. No surprises there.

For one of the “special characters” I used “ö” (umlaut o), which is a normal character in my language (which is the same as the tax offices, so they should be aware of those). The web site filter happily accepted this password containing the “ö”. But the back engine got a severe case of digital diarrhea from it. I had to clear my caches and cookies to completely re-starting the application process.

Another password SNAFU I had many years ago in a place using TN3270 terminals. To those who have never seen such a thing, it is a so-called “smart terminal”. It does not send and receive single characters like a telnet or SSH session, but the host sends a mask to the terminal, defining fields that can be filled out, and with a “send” or “function” key (IIRC) you could send the data back. Those fields had fixed lengths, of course. You might guess the problem…

So the login screen had two fields of eight characters each: “Username” and “Password”. I entered the credentials I have been given and sent them. The first thing I did was to select “change password”. It opened a form with three fields: “old password”, “new password”, and “repeat new password”. Nothing odd about that, but the fields had twelve characters. So, not knowing the particulars of that system (I was used to UNIX style terminals back then), I entered a new password that was longer than eight characters. Guess what? I logged out, I tried to log in, I was stuck. I had to ask my admin to reset my password. And had found the first of many, many bugs in that system.

There is such a thing as good unhinged?

I’m going to need an example here…

Not sure if it falls under the same category, but the way Activision handles (handled? I haven’t used them since) passwords was atrocious! I had to reset my password to get back into my account, I used a random diceware password, it accepted it. However! The client on both Windows and Xbox wouldn’t let you input a password longer than I believe 20 characters. So while you can set a 25 character password, you can go fuck yourself if you actually wanna log in…

The most basic rules commonly required everywhere. When you have such specific rules, it ironically actually makes finding the password through brute force easier because you can eliminate a bunch of variables that could have existed without all the rules. I can eliminate any permutation under 8 characters, doesn’t contain a number, and doesn’t contain a special character.

It will still possibly take a billion years to guess, but it could have been two billion without the rules.

Of course, I also find it wild that the metric for how good an encryption or password system is, is just how long it would take to guess every possible combination of input it could be, sequentially. It doesn’t account for a brute force attempt that just selects random inputs. It could take until the heat death of the universe… It could take 3 seconds. It’s up to chance at that point. Not to mention all the easier ways of getting a password. Like gaslighting the person who knows it into giving it up.

“Password must contain letters numbers, and at least one of these special characters.”

Turns out, half of those special characters weren’t allowed 🫠

12 characters, upper/lower/special requirement, and no more than two occurrences of the same character together. That’s FedEx.

Two other thoughts on the topic:

• Websites/apps/etc should always list their password requirements on the login page to make it easier to determine what password you used for the site in question.
• There are plenty of websites where I literally log in only by using the “forgot password” flow because their password requirements are so ridiculous.

Not allowing you to paste a password, so you have to type it manually every time.

I hate any password requirement that says “special characters” but has a list of exceptions, like no . , ! ; or empty spaces. Just tell the user to make a passphrase, enforce at least one empty space and, dunno, 25 characters minimum, and bam. It’s not like hackers try brute force anymore, they just hack insecure DBs full of user data and use that everywhere.

One special character.

Seems logic right? Until you get that it is one and one only. Took me some time.

Anyone remember the Password Game?

I personally hate character limits. I understand minimum character count, but I can’t have more than 15 characters? Bruh

The most funny one was a professional and rather costly password checking tool.

Besides the usual other rules, it had a rule that the new pw must not be similar to the old one. For similarity, this thing checked each character in it’s place.

So you could have the old one:
“MyAssMy$1” and the new one:
“$1MyAssMy” and it was not similar at all :)

I had a wi-fi device a few years ago that would require a password up to 12 characters, but that requirement wasn’t explicitly written anywhere. The device would gladly accept a 13-character password, for example, but you would never be able to log in again (factory-resetting was the only way to undo).

More recently I purchased a Lennox HVAC system that came with their proprietary thermostat (an Android tablet with a wall mount). During the Christmas break I got myself a new wi-fi router and had to reconfigure all my wireless devices. After 2 days, the Lennox thermostat was the last device to join the new wi-fi network… and it failed because their password could have any character EXCEPT the asterisk — and my new password had an asterisk. I didn’t like the idea of redoing all my other devices AGAIN just because of this idiotic password rule, so I ended up creating a new SSID just for the thermostat. I named it LENNOXSUCKS.

It happens a bit too often that I make an account somewhere with a long, generated password and then when I log in it throws errors at me.

But a few times a website didn’t just show me an error, I got the whole crash dump including their encryption approach and versioning

Anything that requires regular password resets. It’s fine if it’s changed on the site and in the user’s vault automatically, but if a user has to type in their password with any sort of regularity, it’s a recipe for disaster to require regular changes.

People write predictable or formulaic passwords, or just end up resetting their password more often than necessary because they forgot it (making them more susceptible to phishing).

My work was using some MS-based account system, but I don’t know if this was stock or something they modified. When you had to change your password, it would tell you if your new password didn’t meet the password requirements, as usual. What it wouldn’t tell you was what those requirements were…

So yeah, the requirements the system won’t tell you about would have to be the worst one i came across…