Slashdot Mirror
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?"
"0123456789aBcDeF"
That's amazing. I've got the same password on my 6-piece luggage set!
Those requirements don't sound too tough, though 16 charaters is a little long.
As for remembering strong passwords, my method is this: think of a phrase, take the first letter of every word, substitute in some h4x0r numbers for letters, and make a few letters uppercase. It takes an afternoon or so before I can type it without thinking.
Example:
Slashdot is full of bad grammer,misspellings and inaccuracy
=
s1F0bgMaI
The phrase is easy to remember; the number and uppercase substitutions come with repetition.
Jan: 0123456789abcDE_
Feb: 123456789abcDE_0
Mar: 23456789abcDE_01
You get the idea
No digit will ever be the same as the same digit in any previous 15 passwords. It contains numbers, lower and upper case letters, and a non-alphanumeric character.
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.
I know a few...
"Theta alpha two seven three seven blue"
"One one A"
"One one A two B"
"One B two B 3"
"Zero zero zero destruct zero"
But usually, voice identification is enough.
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.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
The key is not how complex you can make a password.
... 288 a day ... 864 over a 3 day weekend. Round that up to a thousand and it's still a "one chance in a million" to guess the password over 3 days of trying.
The key is how will an attacker defeat it.
So, a simple password is sufficient if the attacker will not have enough chances (statistically) to defeat it. This is easy to accomplish by having a time delay between authentication attempts or a lock-out period. But this is only sufficient if you have a person actively monitoring the authentication logs.
Example: Suppose you have a list of 10,000 common words. You take a random word, a digit (0-9) and another word, that will give you 10,000 x 10 x 10,000 possible combinations (1,000,000,000 or "one billion"). So, if you get 3 guesses before you're locked out for 15 minutes, then you can guess 12 passwords an hour
As long as there is someone reviewing the logs, the attempts will be noticed and actions can be taken before there is any real chance of your password being cracked.
And WordNumberWord is not that difficult to remember.
Now, this is NOT a good practice for passwords for encrypted files or anything else that can be cracked off-line.
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.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
In all reality the long password idea is great. However once you have a 16 digit password it no longer really matters if you mix it with numbers and special charaters. This is from an article on password myths: "Now consider this password: SeandialVickyandhorusbloomkendallWyoming. It is not complex by any measure. It contains only two character types and all of the components are words. They are, in fact, words picked from the Microsoft password strength checker's dictionary, which includes 2,254 words. There are 40 characters in this password. The character set those characters are chosen from consist of uppercase and lowercase English characters, or 52 characters in total. That means there are a total of 4.45×1068 1 to 40-character passwords possible from that character set. If you use a brute force attack and you can guess 600 passwords per second, it will take you 1.63×1058 years to guess this password. But you may have captured a connection to a server and have the challenge-response sequence to crack it. In this case it will take you only 1.30×1054 years, assuming you are a nation-state and have access to nearly unlimited computing power." Also having to change the password every month is a terrible idea as others have described and is completley uneeded. With proper audit tools administrators should be able to tell if a user is logging in at odd times or in odd ways. If this is seen then someone most likely has this persons account information; however if this is not the case then making this person change their password every month only makes him change a secure password.
Eating the brains of your enemies does not make you smarter. But it's still fun.
I've always found it a total pain to remember passwords for different resources, so I came up (probably stole the idea from someone, too long ago) with a method of using the keyboard as a sort of encoder/decoder. What I do is I have a memorable word or phrase, but I always type in the letters above or below the actual characters. This means I can turn a memorable phrase, say, "slashdot.org", into gibberish, like "woqwye95l94t". (No, that isn't my Slashdot login, so don't even think about it :).)
I've found that, while you need to think about it at the start, it doesn't take too long before you're used to using it. Of course you can (as I have) obfuscate it even more. For example, you could change the case (upper/lower) on alternate letters, type your memorable word/phrase in backwards, alternate above and below keys, etc.
Just an idea, real good for the corporate logins... you can easily remember a word or name, and quickly turn it into something the IT Dept. would approve of.
This is surprisingly secure, as long as you write it somewhere safe. Security pioneer Dorothy Denning does this, as do a number of other "security professionals". There are simply too many places a password is needed now to follow good security rules for all of them. The human-factor limitations lead to the obvious conclusions that people must either:
Writing down a password is safe if nobody can get hold of what it's written on. Storing it online is pretty much just like writing it down, except there are opportunities to make it safer. There's really no safe way to use the same password lots of different places or a really simple password.
Use a password generator to create some truly horrific 20-character monster and write it down. Keep that paper safe!
so basically, passwords are irrelevant, but are a tangible element to everyone. so when the boss asks for better security, the IT admin implements greater password complexity, the boss notices because he has to type the damn password every day, and the IT admin get kudos. because of course, if user convenience decreased, security obviously increased. yay.
what is the value of having a complex password? it should be complex enough an attacker can not guess it. everything else relates to an attacker's ability to *crack* passwords, which is irrelevant in the world of windows these days. in a few years, NTLM will have died and kerberos will rule the day. then things might be different.
They're easy to remember and extremely difficult to brute force. Just tell your users "Write a snippet of something which is meaningful to you". We can all type at 30+ words a minute so entering a 30 character password in natural English (perhaps without spaces) goes supringly fast. For example, supposing I liked classical literature, I could use socaesarmaythenlesthemayprevent (this is part of Brutus' soliliquy in Act 2 Scene 1 of Julius Caesar, which I had to memorize way back in high school). If you want to be reaaaaally anal you can obfuscate it a bit (l33tify, what have you). There is no convinient dictionary of "meaningful phrases in English" out there, although I suppose it would be somewhat less than secure if someone were able to find out you were, e.g., a Star Trek fan. And they're guaranteed to be easy to remember -- humans are a lot better remembering natural language they have an emotional connection to than remembering arbitrary alphanumeric strings. In fairness, I stole this tip from a Slashdot discussion about a year back sparked by advice from Microsoft, and have been using rediculously long passphrases since for all my "if that breaks, I'm "#$"#"#$%ed" logins (I still go with crazy insecure for trivial things like my slashdot login). I've got about 12 of them at the moment and have no problems with remembering them and changing with the security policy, whereas beforehand I had a discrete post-it.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.