Comment by dcow 4 days ago
There’s weird math that says your password or generally a secret key is more secure if it’s existed for less time (generated fresh) because there hasn’t been as much time to brute force it. I don’t believe it but some hardcore types do.
> I don’t believe it but some hardcore types do.
… which is why the password has sufficient entropy such that it will take until the heat death of the universe to brute force it. We're 3 months closer to the heat death of the universe … oh no?
Time based expiry (“freshness”) is not about likelihood of brute force. Brute force prevention is handled by delay/lockout policy for online systems, and by password complexity rules or key length/cipher combinations. Nobody sane uses such rules in such a way that make brute force “slightly impractical”- security practitioners always choose lifetime-of-the-universe-scale complexity if given a choice.
Instead, expiry is about “what are the chances that the secret has already leaked” and about choosing an acceptable compromise between rotation frequency and attacker loiter time - assuming that the system hasn’t been back doored, let’s put an upper limit on how long an attacker with the secret has access. And incidentally it also means that if you somehow fail to disable access for ex-employees, that lingering access will eventually take care of itself.
But as the article points out, expiry has always been controversial and it’s not clear that on balance expiry is a good control.
if it causes 90% of people to just enter a simpler password, out of frustration and “fatigue”, then this is irrelevant IMO. Theory doesn’t take into account human behavior.
It’s especially annoying when a company enforces these brain dead policies on employees. You want people to waste mental effort changing their passwords by 1 letter every 3 months, just to appease some IT manager? Give me a break lol.
I’d rather have a long complex password that i remember and remember ONCE.
That's what baffles me. Somehow security NEVER acknowledges that security theater, cognitive overload and constant friction makes users more inclined to make bad decisions, repetition over months make this even worse.
Hackers need just one chain of tired persons to breach a system. Sometimes length(chain) = 1, that's when bad things happen.
Anecdotal PS: I used to work at a bank and had to rotate my password monthly (sometimes even more, because there were unfederated systems that required another password, also with rotation). Eventually all my passwords became [short STRING] + [autoincremental INT]. We had MFA, so it didn't matter that much, but that makes it even more hilarious.
I think directly caused by the fact that at large companies, the best way to get ahead is to be seen as doing things. It doesn't matter if those things are completely harmful, so long as they sound good. With password changes you now have company wide visibility, with regularity, doing something that to somebody who's not thinking much would probably be suggestive of doing a very thorough job.
For most people, writing (most of) their password on a piece of paper that they keep in their wallet would be pretty good security.
Paper can't be hacked, and writing down the password allows for more complicated passwords. In case someone gets access to your wallet, you still keep a portion of the password not written down.
(And if someone gets physical access to your stuff, you are hosed in general, because they can just install a keylogger. So even keeping your password fragment on a post-it under your keyboard would be fine-ish.)
It really depends on what password. At home our wifi password is on a paper, right there on the office board. If you landed in the room, I won't feel more in security if you need other actions to get the password out of me.
> At home our wifi password is on a paper, right there on the office board.
You probably should know that recent smartphones (the most likely devices to ask for a wifi password at home) have features to share a password right in the settings. iPhones will simply ask you (or anyone connected) to allow them, and androids have some sort of sharing enabled (via qr code generally).
That might apply to short passwords but passphrases are recommended and if they're >20 characters then brute forcing is not going to make meaningful progress toward them while we are all alive.