Rethinking Password Policies

Passwords are perhaps the oldest and best-known security technologies in use today, as well as perhaps the most hated and despised. Security professionals dislike passwords because they often provide woefully inadequate security, and users hate them because they are hard to remember and manage. Security policy requirements often exacerbate this situation by imposing arcane requirements for password "complexity" and by requiring users to change passwords frequently (just when they are really, solidly stuck in our memory).The latest publication from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on the topic of authenticators (NIST Special Publication 800-63B) advances some exciting ideas that run counter to the typical ideas about how passwords should be chosen and managed:
  • Systems should give users a minimum of ten attempts at entering their password. 

  • Users should be encouraged to make their passwords long, and the length of passwords should not be limited to any less than 64 characters. 

    • In fact, the preferred term should be "passPHRASE" rather than "passWORD," as it encourages users to make them longer.

    • The use of all possible special characters, including spaces, should be allowed. Allowing spaces further encourages the use of PHRASES.

  • Rules for character choice, such as requiring certain numbers of different types of characters (numbers, upper case, lower case, special characters) should NOT be used.

  • Users should NOT be required to change their passphrase after an arbitrary period of time. Changes are only needed if the user requests to make a change or if there is evidence of compromise. 
Ultimately, with passwords the rule is: "Longer is Stronger." The use of real phrases is a strong practice, as a grammatical phrase will naturally have a combination of different types of characters, such as upper case, lower case, punctuation, and spaces. Real phrases are easier to remember than complex, mangled combinations of characters, and yet will be much longer than passwords typically are. And users who can touch type can likely type in a natural phrase as quickly as a shorter password with a complicated combination of character types.

These recommendations definitely fly in the face of long-standing received wisdom about how to choose and manage secure passwords. It will be interesting to see how industry reacts and whether some of the common practices will begin to change. Ultimately, multi-factor authentication is more secure than any type of password or passphrase, but using policies that help users to choose and use longer passwords is a step in the right direction.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/11/theres-a-new-way-to-make-strong-passwords-and-its-way-easier/

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#sec6

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