Here is the text of the NIST sp800-63b Digital Identity Guidelines.
All this 2FA, SSH, token / key stuff is garbage. Rectal vascular mapping is the only legitimate security option.
Meanwhile, my company has systems insisting on expiring ssh keys after 90 days…
Fools! You have to expire the whole system!
Reinstall everything every 90 days. It’s the only way.
I’m surprised they’d expire the SSH keys rather than just requiring the password for the key to be rotated. I guess it’s not too bad if the key itself is automatically rotated.
It would be more secure to have SSH keys that are stored on Yubikeys, though. Get the Yubikeys that check fingerprints (Yubikey Bio) if you’re extra paranoid.
Problem they had was that ssh doesn’t really have any way to enforce details of how the client key manifests and behaves. They could ship out the authentication devices after the security team trusted the public key, but that was more than they would have been willing to deal with.
Rotating the passphrase in the key wouldn’t do any good anyway. If an attacker got a hold of your encrypted key to start guessing the passphrase, that instance of the key will never know that another copy has a passphrase change.
My company blocked ssh keys in favour of password + 2FA. Honestly I don’t mind the 2FA since we use yubikeys, but wouldn’t ssh key + 2FA be better?
All well and good when ssh activity is anchored in a human doing interactive stuff, but not as helpful when there’s a lot of headless automation that has to get from point a to point b.
We use keys + Yubikey 2FA (the long alphanumeric strings when you touch the Yubikey) at work, alhough they want to move all 2FA to Yubikey FIDO2/WebAuthn in the future since regular numeric/text 2FA codes are vulnerable to phishing. All our internal webapps already require FIDO2, as does our email (Microsoft 365).
Interesting that unicode support is suggested. Emoji passwords could be fun.
Characters are characters. The system I just wrote will accept anything, because the first thing I do with it is hash it. If you want to make your password:
░▒▓█ ʥ۞ݔݯݲݸݴݺ '; drop table users; 🤣💩ʩ █▓▒░
Then go for it. More power to you for typing that out or, more likely, letting your password manager remember it. Make your password as entropic as you can manage, I don’t care how you arrive there.
Yup. All I care is that your password isn’t the entire works of Shakespeare or something like that. A couple hundred characters/bytes? You do you.
What really bothers me is when a website says something like: must have a special character, except these ones (proceeds to list everything except @ and !). And then the next one has the same rule, but different exceptions.
Passwords should be treated as a black box, just read it as bytes and throw it into the hash algorithm. You want to somehow enter a nyan cat? Be my guest, no guarantee the input box will accept it though.
also: “password is too long, max password length is 12 digits”
Why… like, sure, cap it at 256 or something reasonable. but ive run into as low as 9 digits.
Yeah, multiple languages or even putting an ê or something in an English password to mix things up. It makes perfect sense to allow.
It’s a good thing they require each codepoint to be treated as one character for the length limit, since “🤔🤣” is 8 bytes on its own, but the unicode prefix is trivial to guess.
The app my work uses to show 401k, pay, request leave, etc details, uses a ridiculous webapp that’s very slow, and on top of this, they nag you literally every 4 months to update your password. I used to be a good boy and memorize a new password each time. Now I just add a new letter into BitWarden and it’s my new password. Apparently this is more secure??
My favorite are some of the work systems that I need to access, but only infrequently, yet still have ridiculous password expiration rules. Nearly every time I log in, before I can access the system I have to change my password because of course it’s expired again. So I change the password, write it down because I’ll never remember it months from now when I need to use that password exactly once to login and change my password yet again.
One thing they should change is the word “password.” This implies that it’s a short string. Changing it to “passphrase” will help people feel comfortable choosing credentials like “correct horse battery staple.”
I recently set up a password with a 16 character max, alphanumeric only, no spaces. The service is in no way a security threat but still.
