Password Complexity in the Enterprise?

andrewa asks: "What's the deal with passwords in a corporate environment these days? The company I work for has introduced layer upon layer of complexity on passwords over the years, and now it is simply ridiculous. We have to enter a 16 character password each month that cannot compare in any digits to the previous twelve passwords, nor can it be a simple string -- it has to be a mixture of upper- and lower-case characters including numerals and non-alphanumerical characters. What's next? A mixture of non-keyboard accessible characters and several varieties of DNA? It's not like we are even a government institute -- we are a software company that does telecom stuff, for goodness sake. Anyway ... you know what this makes me do? Write it down somewhere. How secure is that? The question is, I think my company is completely anal with the password requirements, what other security policies are in place in other companies that either completely exceed the banality of my company, or -- God forbid -- have a security system that makes sense?"

Comments

Suggested to me:

[wild_berry]

One of the best I'd seen was to take first letters (or last, or second, etc.) from words in a song that you know the lyrics well. They have a decent amount of randomness and each album you buy will supply a couple of years' worth of passwords.

Writing them down in a safe location is a helpful aide-memoir. You could just have a lyrics file saved to a thumb drive or scrawled in a diary.

Well, this is a classic dilemma

[biglig2]

Make the passwords to hard to remember and people write them down because thay have to.

Some advice Bruce Schneider once gave: there is nothing so terribly wrong with writing your password down on a piece of paper and putting it into your wallet. Your wallet is a security mechanism that you already use, and you are very practiced at keeping it secure.

Myself, I use muscle memory to store mine. I make up an entierley random password and spend 20 minutes typing it over and over again until my hands remember how to make that sequence of twitches. Works great; and no risk of me acidentally telling someone my password because I don't know what it is.

Re:That's not too strange

[renelicious]

Actaully I think the "first letter of the phrase" idea is too complex, why not just use a phrase. Most sane passwords allow up to 128 characters. You can easily type a whole sentence, which is much easier to remember. Use something like:

Jane's birthday is on October 12th. (with puncuation)

or

Do or do not, there is no try.

Re:unlikely

[19thNervousBreakdown]

In my job, I talk to network administrators very frequently while supporting our software. Generally the problem is, our product's default password doesn't meet their complexity requirements. The solution is simple, I ask them what their requirements are and make one up that meets them.

Those requirements are absolutely not unlikely. I run into requirements at least as idiotic about once a month. Some of the stuff I've heard, I didn't even think it was possible to create a password that met them, and they had to be changed once a month. I've also run into stuff that probably reduces the keyspace (requiring 2 numbers, 2 special characters, 2 upper, 2 lower tells you a lot about every password when minimum length is 8). That one also had to be changed monthly.

These requirements are for ... well, I'm not going to even say what type of company that last particular one was in order to protect my job, but trust me, you'd be very surprised, and probably upset. The fact is, the type of critical thinker that can actually come up with a good password policy is somehow a rare person, even in IT. Since the people doing the hiring generally have no idea how to interview, you'll find that person with almost perfect random distribution at small and large companies, government offices, schools, banks, consultants, mom-n-pop stores, you name it. It's a sad, sad situation.