Not only does the credit bureau max out their password length, you have a small list of available non-alphanumeric characters you can use, and no spaces. Also you cannot used a plused email address, and it had an issue with my self hosted email alias, forcing me to use my gmail address.
Both Experian and transunion had no password length limitations, nor did they require my username be my email address.
Update: I have been unable to log into my account for the last 3 days now. Every time I try I get a page saying to call customer service. After a total of 2 hours on hold I finally found the issue, you cannot connect to Equifax using a VPN. In addition there is no option for 2FA (not even email or sms) and they will hang up on you if you push the issue of their security being lax. Their reasoning for lax security and no vpn usage is “well all of our other customers are okay with this”.
I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: 16 Characters are sufficient and 20 pretty damn secure.
That is assuming they do stuff right and there are no vulnerabilities, which they won’t and there are. However they may manifest, they are a greater concern at 16+ characters, especially if they don’t offer 2FA.
The reason is that even if machines become powerful enough that 16 characters can be bruteforced, which they can’t atm, you can effectively defend everything against bruteforce attacks by other means. Including but not limited to limiting login attempts, salts and pepper, multiple encryption layers etc.
With just a salt pepper you can make a 16 char password effectively a 24 char password… Or a 2.000.000 char password. Assuming it is not stolen alongside that is.
Edit: Changed ‘salt’ to ‘pepper’.
That’s not how salt works. It will be stolen alongside the password hash, because salt is necessarily in plaintext. It doesn’t increase the guessability of passwords. It just makes it infeasible to precompute your guesses.
A password only 8 chars long can still be brute forced, salt or not.
Without salt, the attacker would make a guess, run the hash on the password, and compare it to the stored version.
With salt, the attacker would make a guess, combine it with the salt, and then run the hash and compare like before.
What salt does is prevent a shortcut. The attacker has a big list of passwords and their associated hash values. They grab the hash out of the leaked database, compare it to the list, and match it to the original plaintext. When the hashes have a salt, they would need to generate the list for every possible salt value. For a sufficiently long salt that’s unique to each password entry, that list would be infeasible to generate, and infeasible to store even if you could.
If your passwords were long and random enough, then it’s also infeasible to generate that list to cover everything. It really only works against dictionary words and variations (like “P4ssw0rD”).
The actual length of the password isn’t the problem. If they were “doing stuff right” then it would make no difference to them whether the password was 20 characters or 200, because once it was hashed both would be stored in the same amount of space.
The fact that they’ve specified a limit is strong evidence that they’renot doing it right
Some hashing algorithms are suspectible to long password denial of service so it’s recommended to limit the length of password but certainly not to 20 characters but to a more reasonable limit, like 100 characters or so.
I tend to prefer pass phrases, they are a lot easier to type and speak, if required. Mine regularly blow past 20 characters.
As for salting, that only defends against rainbow table attacks. The salt needs to be stored along with the hash. That is find for most accounts, but once you’re in banking territory, that’s a bad bet.
You also can’t assume you have no vulnerabilities. If someone gets your database, you can’t defend against brute force attacks.
Lastly, if you are doing passwords properly, you shouldn’t care much about length. There are a few dos attacks to worry about, but a 512 char limit will stop those, and not limit any sane password.
Super long passwords aren’t going to do you any good when their database is compromised and sold to anyone with a few bucks.
Its not like some one is gonna be brute forcing your account password, it would lock your account after like ten tries.
Quite the contrary.
Password hashing is standard nowadays.
When a database is compromised, brute forcing hashes is necessary to recover passwords, and the short ones are the first ones to be recovered.
So what? They’ll get your single use randomly generated password months/years/decades after you’ve already changed it?
Which begs the question, how often do people really change their passwords unless they’re forced to? This feels like the sort of thing that somebody should have studied.
the Ring app (I think) forced me to change my Wi-Fi password because I wasn’t allowed to use ampersands. according to support it’s because they “use ampersands in the code”
You mean the company that had a feature in place that allowed law enforcement to request and access video footage from your devices without obtaining a warrant first?
As expected, their security measures were also found to be lacking.
Yeah, no thanks.
I encountered something like this at work. It wasn’t pass related, it was just a means of getting people to make text responses. Ampersands were replaced with some gibberish format, which annoyed everyone.
I got some kind of explanation from our tech people, which I understood to mean that ampersand was used to indicate that what followed was live code. Turning the ampersand into gibberish text was a safety measure to stop mischief.
I’ve noticed ampersand replacements in some news feeds too
A 20 character password of case insensitive letters and numbers is quite unbreakable (taking billions of years to brute force). Still, what a strange way to announce your database is old and you probably aren’t hashing your password with anything stronger than MD5. Or worse.
My default is to generate a 32 character password and store it in a password manager. Doesn’t matter to me how many characters it has since I’m just going to copy and paste it anyway.
Pretty surprising how many places enforce shorter passwords though… I had a bank that had a maximum character limit of 12. I don’t bank with them anymore. Short password limits is definitely is an indicator of bad underlying security practices.
A hash has a fixed length, including MD5. There’s no reason to cap password (input) Iength. You can hash the whole bible and still get the same length hash. So either they don’t even hash it, they’re idiots, or they try to be unnecessarily cautious to avoid some other limit / overflow, like POST max size (which would still be counted in at least KB, not several characters). The limit on what special characters you can use is also highly suspicious - that’s not how you deal with injections / escaping your inputs.
