Good Essay on the Historic previous of Unhealthy Password Insurance coverage insurance policies
Stuart Schechter makes some good components on the historic previous of harmful password insurance coverage insurance policies:
Morris and Thompson’s work launched much-needed information to deal with a problem that numerous of us suspected was harmful, nonetheless that had not been studied scientifically. Their work was a large step forward, if not for two errors which may impede future progress in bettering passwords for a few years.
First, was Morris and Thompson’s confidence that their reply, a password protection, would restore the underlying draw back of weak passwords. They incorrectly assumed that within the occasion that they prevented the actual courses of weak spot that they’d well-known, that the tip outcome may be one factor sturdy. After implementing a requirement that password have a variety of characters items or additional entire characters, they wrote:
These enhancements make it exceedingly troublesome to hunt out any explicit individual password. The patron is warned of the risks and if he cooperates, he is very safe actually.
As should be obvious now, a shopper who chooses “p@ssword” to regulate to insurance coverage insurance policies resembling these proposed by Morris and Thompson is simply not very safe actually. Morris and Thompson assumed their intervention may be environment friendly with out testing its efficacy, considering its unintended penalties, and even defining a metric of success to examine in opposition to. Not solely did their hunch remodel unsuitable, nonetheless their second mistake prevented anyone from proving them unsuitable.
That second mistake was convincing sysadmins to hash passwords, so there was no methodology to contemplate how secure anyone’s password really was. And it wasn’t until hackers started stealing and publishing large troves of exact passwords that we obtained the information: individuals are horrible at producing secure passwords, even with tips.
Posted on November 15, 2024 at 7:05 AM •
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Sidebar image of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
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