Comment by asveikau

Comment by asveikau 6 months ago

5 replies

Sometimes when I log into a random website and I see a forced password reset, I wonder if it has been compromised, rather than setting a time-based expiry.

If a site owner knows that certain accounts are part of a database breach or something, a reasonable step would be to force the users to change the password at next login.

mooreds 6 months ago

Another common reason to do a force password reset is if they've moved authentication providers and were not able to bring their hashes along. Some providers don't allow for hash export (Cognito, Entra).

  • account42 6 months ago

    Or just if they changed to a more secure hash algorithm themselves and want to upgrade users still on the older insecure one.

    • blueflow 6 months ago

      This can be done at login time without the user noticing, as you have the plaintext password for a moment.

      • mooreds 6 months ago

        Yeah, this is the best practice. We offer that in our product.

        But it's possible that you could follow the best practice and still force a reset. This could be because:

        * the customer or provider doesn't want to wait for everyone to log in

        * they've waited for N months and now there is a block of users who have not logged in yet and they think it is worth the user annoyance to just force them all to reset their password

    • RealStickman_ 6 months ago

      They could do that by comparing against the old hash and if it matches generate the new hash to store somewhere.