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430 points tambourine_man | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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mr_mitm ◴[] No.41879391[source]
I'm glad someone is thinking about UX and ergonomics when it comes to passwords. Most people I interact with have by now realized that generating passwords is a good idea. But if you are already generating the password, please do not include special characters. I regularly use different keyboard layouts (sometimes it is not even clear which layout is active, like in the vSphere web console), and the fact that passwords are often not shown on the screen when typing them makes for terrible UX and causes frustration.

The usual advice about character classes is only for casual users who don't know what makes a secure password. Entropy is the deciding factor: Ten random lower case letters is much more secure than "Summer2024!", which satisfies most password rules and has more characters.

Personally I stick to lower case letters for things like my Netflix password or Wifi key, because typing with a TV remote can be a huge pain. To keep a similar entropy, just increase the length by one or two characters.

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coldpie ◴[] No.41879556[source]
In the context of web authentication, does entropy even matter (beyond an extremely low threshold)? Are there any attacks that actually occur that are defeated by increasing entropy? AFAIK basically all the auth attacks we see today are from password re-use, and out-of-band authentication, neither of which password entropy has an effect on.

"Summer2024!" is perfectly fine, if you use it for exactly one service. Frankly, "1235" is probably fine. No one is out there brute-forcing passwords.

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1. mr_mitm ◴[] No.41879633[source]
> "Summer2024!" is perfectly fine, if you use it for exactly one service. Frankly, "1235" is probably fine. No one is out there brute-forcing passwords.

Respectfully, I disagree. "Summer2024!" is probably the second password I'd try after the username itself if I have to guess a password. Use it in a password spraying attack on a company with 500 users and you will get a few hits, I promise.

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2. coldpie ◴[] No.41879685[source]
It's a fair point, but I think my argument still stands. Guessability is a different property from entropy, yeah? "Summer1975!" has the same entropy, but you probably wouldn't have put that into your password sprayer.
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3. nemo8551 ◴[] No.41883737[source]
My old work used to give a default month-year-org name and an exclamation mark. The majority of people who still used it was insane. LinkedIn was a treasure trove for logging into accounts.
4. joshka ◴[] No.41889139[source]
Summer1975! would be equally likely to be checked by a password sprayer. It has the same number of hits on HIBP, and falls into a category where heuristic password guess algorithms would generally group them as being the same thing.