Best practice in 2023 is a simple, sufficiently long but memorable passphrase. Excessive requirements mean users just create weak passwords with patterns.
[Capital letter]basic word(number){special character}
Enforcing password changes doesnt help either. It just creates further patterns. The vast majority of compromised credentials are used immediately or within a short time frame anyway. Changing the password 2 months later isnt going to help and passwords like July2023!, which are common, are weak to begin with.
A non expiring, long, easily remembered passphase like
forgetting-spaghetti-toad-box
Is much more secure than a short password with enforced complexity requirements.
Drop “memorable”. 99.9% of your passwords should be managed by your password manager and don’t need to be memorized. On one or two passwords that you actually need to type (like your computer login) need to be memorable.
99.9% of your passwords should be managed by your password manager
this looks like a sensible approach until you remember password managers can be cracked, too. I’m with GP on this, a passphrase is easier to remember and is good enough for most use cases, if you need more security you should be using some form or another of 2FA anyway
I am kinda paranoid about password managers. My passwords are stored somewhere on the computer, all of them, and I don’t like that idea. I can exercise my brain.
I encourage you to think critically about this and re-evaluate your decision. I would say that for at least 99.99% of people a password manager is significantly more secure overall.
- Browser-integrated password managers will avoid filling your password into the wrong site. This is a great barrier to phishing.
- Allows a unique password per-site which greatly mitigates the problem of password leaks which are fairly common.
- Allows you to use much stronger passwords than you can memorize.
- It’s quite convenient to just click “login”.
For most people phishing is a far bigger risk than some malware stealing their local password databases. To make database theft even less of a concern most password managers have the option to encrypt the local database file. This means that to steal your passwords the malware will need to extract the encryption key from the password manager process which can often be configured to forget the key quickly after the last use.
Also consider that if you have malware that can steal your password database and the encryption key it can probably just keylog all your passwords or steal your browser’s cookie jar. So the extra barrier here is minimal.
I think you are right to be suspicious of having a vault of passwords “ready to steal” but in practice the upsides far outweigh the downsides, especially if you make a security-focused choice of password manager.
I’ve been using keepassxc for a while now and it’s better than most other options, everything is stored locally and encrypted behind a master password.
All you micht want to do is make a backup of your vault onto an external drive (best practice would be encrypted via the options you have, I use luks because I’m a Linux nerd).
forgetting-spaghetti-toad-box
I don’t know much about PW security but would a passphrase of common words not be more susceptible to dictionary attacks?
The idea is that entropy is measured with possible words instead of possible characters. It turns out 7 7-bit ascii characters have less entropy than 4 14-bit equivalent words (that is, the 16,384 most common ones). And that’s in the ideal case it’s a totally random 7 characters.
Every attack is technically a dictionary attack here, but it doesn’t help enough because the password to a computer is still 30 characters long. To a human it seems a lot easier than ")f1:.{yJCzNv]@R=S K$~= ", though.
PS. Turning /dev/random output into 7-bit ascii characters is surprisingly involved in Haskell. C would have been easier. This was the world’s slowest ninja edit.
Thanks for the explanation, I remember the explanation in https://xkcd.com/936/ but wasn’t sure how that held up for different attack methods.
