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Passwords - 64 Characters, Changed Daily?
isepic writes "It seems over the past few years that the password requirements have changed - each time making it even more difficult to crack. My company just changed its password requirements from 180 days down to 90 for most servers and from a minimum of six characters up to eight. So, as parallel processing computer clusters gain in power according to Moore's law, how are we expected to change them in the next 2-10 years --- and how often?"
"Hopefully by then, there will be a better way, but I really don't want to have to change my password every 8 hours, and not be able to use the last 5 I've used, AND have them each be some awfully long and complex string of hard-to-remember ASCII codes just because a computer can crack a 32 char password in 10 seconds.
What are your thoughts? Do you think one day we'll be SOL, or do you think something 'better' may come (e.g. biometric scanners on every keyboard and or mouse and or monitor - etc.)"
In my opinion as a Sysadmin, it doesn't matter what device[s] you bring in to try to 'secure' users and passwords.
They still write them down, still 'share' (if somebody hasn't got access to a file share the other has, but he/she wants them to look at something - (they don't even *think* about the option to copy it to a public share to do it!) - then they give out passwords.
Plus normal users forget them after a few days of work anyway - I reset usually around 5 passwords Monday mornings after people had two days off work - plus average 10 a week afterwards on a user base of 150.