this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Mildly Infuriating

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In password security, the longer the better. With a password manager, using more than 24 characters is simple. Unless, of course, the secure password is not accepted due to its length. (In this case, through STOVE.)

Possibly indicating cleartext storage of a limited field (which is an absolute no-go), or suboptimal or lacking security practices.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

At least they tell you. I signed up with websites that just cut the password after the 12th character. No way of signing in with the password again (not without trying a couple of times, at least)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

when you varchar(24) and forget about the hash

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

I like it that the site says the max length....this is not common. I wish it was.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

One of the accounts that I have to use at my job is like this but much much worse. It only accepts letters and numbers, no capitalization, no symbols and can only be 8 digits long maximum. It's like they want to account to be easy to compromise.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

That sounds like the limitations of an ancient mainframe system. If so, then someone trying to brute force their way in would be more likely to crash the system instead.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

You've got to stop all those who put: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

That's my password for most things, any hackers die of RSI before they get in.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 17 hours ago

If I have to create a password Ill need to remember and don't have access to my password manager for whatever reason I have a long phrase that's my go to but I have a system about adding numbers and characters to it based on the context of the log in. Sites with character limits really fuck that up.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

i once used 20 for a bank. the website havent told me it was too long just clipped off 2 and accepted the rest. not even the banking support was able to help me. took me a few days to solve this by accident.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago

This shit always pisses me off. I've encountered it in like 2-3 places over the years since I started using a password manager, and every time it's so frustrating and hard to figure out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago

That must have been frustrating. How many times did it lock you out from trying again?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 21 hours ago

I don't have it in me

[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 day ago (2 children)

At least they tell you. I’ve had inputs take the full password and then truncate it silently, so you don’t actually know what they saved. Then, you try to login and they tell you wrong password.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

I once encountered a system that truncated your submitted password if you logged in through their app, but not through their website. So you would set your password through the website, verify that the login was working (through the website) and then have that same login fail through the app.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The password should be hashed anyway, which has a fixed output

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But there must be a (long) max length anyway, to prevent some kinds of attacks.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Long here means a 400 page book as a password.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago

This seems to be very common still

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Some people even suggest typing a longer password over a simpler one with more special characters. It's harder to brute force.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

I thought the use vocabulary lookup tables effectively nullifies the entropy benefits, if everyone started using phrases as password

[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Obligatory xkcd.

I don't know enough to say how accurate the numbers are, but the sentiment stands - if it's a password you're memorizing, longer password will probably be better.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

That's not even the case though. Using a memorized passphrase that can be broken down into individual words is susceptible to dictionary attacks provided you know what the length of the password is. You can algorithmically sort away swathes of the dictionary based on how many likely word combinations exist before searching unusual word combinations. The thing is, passwords suck. It doesn't matter how long the password is, if someone wants in, they'll crack the password or steal it via some other means. Instead of relying on a strong password, you need to be relying on additional proof factors for sign in. Proper MFA with actual secure implementation is far more secure than any password scheme. And additionally, hardware key authentication is even more secure. If you are signing into an account and storing important data there, you do not want to rely on passwords to keep that data secure.

The reason for the character limit on passwords is often to prevent malicious attacks via data dumping in the password dialogue box. Longer numbers take more CPU cycles to properly salt and encrypt. Malicious actors may dump as many characters in a password system as they wish if they wanted to take down a service or at least hurt performance.

Additionally, even if you just used lowercase letters, an 18 character password would take 12 RTX 5090s approximately 284 thousand years to crack according to the recent Hive Systems report.

24 characters is more than enough to be secure as far as passwords alone go. Just know that, nobody is out here brute forcing passwords at any length these days, there are infinite more clever ways of hacking accounts than that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Assuming the attacker knows it's a phrase: The english language alone apparently has some 800.000 words. 800.000^6 = 2*10^35 combinations in a dictionary attack. That's comparable to 18 random ASCII characters. We might also be using a different language, or a combination of languages, or we might deliberately misspell words.

A long string of random characters will give you more combinations per password length, but there are some passwords you just need to be able to memorize, and I'd say that's more likely with the 6 words.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago

Being regected for being too long. What a conundrum.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 day ago (4 children)

My worst experience so far was a webpage that trimmed passwords to 20 characters in length without telling you. Good luck logging in afterwards...

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 day ago (2 children)

One of my favorite memories of how much Something Awful's sysadmins were absolutely amateur hour back in the early 2000s was the "lappy" to "laptop" debacle. Apparently Lowtax found the term "lappy" so annoying that he ordered his system administrator to do a find/replace for every instance of "lappy," replacing them with "laptop."

Unfortunately this included usernames and passwords, as well as anything that just managed to have the letters "lappy" in that order anywhere in the word. So, there was one user named 'Clappy' who woke up one day to find his name changed to 'Claptop.' Apparently this is also how people discovered that they were storing password unsalted in plain text in a fucking MySQL database, which if you're old enough, you probably already remember that the combination of MySQL and PHPmyAdmin were like Swiss cheese when it comes to site defense. :p

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

Flaptop Bird

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago

As long as their login page also does that :p

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago

I remember some office software that didn’t accept certain special characters but didn’t tell the user and just accepted the new password. I had to bother IT support many times to reset my password.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 day ago (6 children)

We have a customer, a big international corporation, that has very specific rules for their intranet passwords:

  • Must contain letters
  • Must contain numbers
  • Must contain special characters
  • No repeats
  • Passwords must be changed every two months
  • Not the same password as any of the last seven
  • PASSWORDS MUST BE EXACTLY EIGHT CHARACTERS LONG

I can only assume that whoever came up with these rules is either an especially demented BofH, or they have some really really weird legacy infrastructure to deal with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago

I worked in IT for a big national company for a short time. Passwords rules were : at least 8 characters, at least one uppercase letter, at least one number, change password every 2/3 months and different than the 3 previous ones. Several workers had a post-it on the screen with the 4 passwords they use. One of them had name of child and year of birth, I don't know if it was his children or his relatives' children too.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I am a designer, but I once did a project with a very very major and recognizable tech corporation that, no joke, implemented an 8 character limit on passwords for storage reasons.

This company made in the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year, and they were penny-pinching on literal bytes of data.

I can't say who it is, but their name begins with 'M' and ends in 'cAfee.'

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I can’t say who it is, but their name begins with ‘M’ and ends in ‘cAfee.’

Whoever the company is, we have to assume it's not a security-related company. Because, surely, none of those would do that ever.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

If password length affects storage size then something has gone very wrong. They should be hashed, not encrypted or in plaintext.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (4 children)

For a system I worked on a few years ago I got the password requirement:

  • Only upper case letters A-Z, no letter or symbols.

  • Exactly 7 characters.

I was also recommended to make it a single word to make it memorable.

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[–] [email protected] 144 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (11 children)

I once registered an account with a random ~25 characters long password (Keepass PM) for buying tickets on https://uhuu.com.br/

The website allowed me to create the account just fine, but once I verified my e-mail, I couldn't log into it due to there being a character limit ONLY IN THE LOGIN PASSWORD FIELD. Atrocious.

EDIT: btw, the character limit was 12

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 day ago (17 children)

This shit pisses me off so bad. I had an identity theft a few years back, took ages to undo, and my credit score is still impacted by it. At the time I moved to a password manager and all my passwords are 31 characters of garbage. I’ve got several, highly sensitive accounts that my passwords don’t work for, in fact one a bank, until fairly recently, had repurposed a phone number field in the DB so passwords were limited to 10 characters numeric only (I managed to get one of their IT folks on the horn to explain why the password was so awful).

I cannot believe we live in 2025 and we still haven’t figured out passwords.

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