this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

If a password input form asks any of these questions, consider the website or service compromised right from the beginning. The reason for this, is that it means they are not storing salted/hashed passwords and your password will be stored as plain text on their servers. There's no reason for any limitations on a password. In the event of a breach, your password will be visible in any database dumped by a hack. Always makes me wince when a password form complains about password length, as it really should not matter. When you hash a password, it will be stored in the database at a specific string length;

Eg; using sha-1 hashing:

pass123 = 5f1e04b7fc8d7067346b77bdbb6a4d4f9f4abace28f15c2b265c710b120393b2
password321 = 8852ab05d5b32f9efd3dcbf69edcfd65464e64c8e5e8310239871e02380e81b3
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All of those things can be verified before storing the password in any way, encrypted or not, and checking them would be a requisite before storing it.

While it's true that they don't have a significant impact on the hash generated, they make it significantly more difficult for anyone to guess your password. It's much easier to guess password321 than something like Or^9L%u&QQ12XxI@. And that has nothing to do with how the password is ultimately stored.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Of course, requiring at least one symbol or upper case letter etc is a good idea, along with a minimum length. Many websites won't let you use a password longer than a certain amount of characters. The only reason for that limitation is that they are storing the database field as plaintext, and anything longer will not fit into that column.

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