Many Password Strength Meters Are Downright Weak, Researchers Say

alphadogg writes "Website password strength meters often tell you only what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear. That's the finding from researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, who examined the usefulness of those ubiquitous red-yellow-green password strength testers on websites run by big names such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Microsoft/Skype. The researchers used algorithms to send millions of 'not-so-good' passwords through these meters, as well as through the meters of password management services such as LastPass and 1Password, and were largely underwhelmed by what they termed wildly inconsistent results. Inconsistent can go both directions: I've seen password-strength meters that balked at absolutely everything (accepting weak passwords as good, after calling wildly long and random ones poor).

Comments

Still waiting for a "hackability meter"

[jeffmeden]

The plain simple truth is that complexity of a password is barely relevant at all when compared to the threat of an outright data breach at a provider. Who cares if your password is 'veronica' (your daughters name) or `myL1ttleBr0ny%` since an attacker isn't going to bother with brute forcing anything but '123456' and 'password' because they will get tarpitted by any reputable provider before they can guess anything out of a dictionary more than 5 entries long.

What we need is a meter on a web site describing how much effort they put into server security, how big their target profile is (how many entry points they have) and a sign that says "??? days since a total data breach!", and then the user can decide if they want an account there at all. How's that coming?

Re:Still waiting for a "hackability meter"

[Gaygirlie]

The plain simple truth is that complexity of a password is barely relevant at all when compared to the threat of an outright data breach at a provider. Who cares if your password is 'veronica' (your daughters name) or `myL1ttleBr0ny%` since an attacker isn't going to bother with brute forcing anything but '123456' and 'password' because they will get tarpitted by any reputable provider before they can guess anything out of a dictionary more than 5 entries long.

Your basis for saying bassword-complexity is irrelevant is that bad people would be doing online brute-forcing? They do matter somewhat when it comes to online-cracking, but the real relevancy doesn't lie there. The passwords matter when it comes to offline brute-forcing: the more complex the password the longer it'll take to crack it even if you have the hash for it. With good passwords and well-done hashing and salting you may end up cracking them for weeks by which time whoever you obtained them from will hopefully already have made their users change their passwords.

Re:is this good?

[jeffmeden]

123Password is very strong because it uses numbers and upper and lower case letters.
Those meters are stupid.

As long as it's not one of either this list: http://gizmodo.com/the-25-most... or just a copy of your exact username, then yep it will probably suit you just fine. Dictionary attacks don't happen in break ins nearly as often as exploiting password resets (via social engineering or otherwise) or other blatant sidesteps of security (token reuse, etc), since everyone tarpits bad logins, sometimes after as few as 3 attempts.