this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Cybersecurity - Memes

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How on earth can you both not accept the password I copied from my password safe and tell me that I cannot use the same pasaword again?

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[–] Willem@kutsuya.dev 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If there has been a data leak, they might block your current password because the hash has been leaked

[–] cron@feddit.org 16 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Yes, that might be a plausible theory. Basically a bad yersion of you must change your password.

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[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If there has been a data leak, they might block your current password because the hash has been leaked

I'm sure that makes them feel much better, lol.

[–] Willem@kutsuya.dev 2 points 1 week ago

The leak doesn't even need to happen on their site, they could check the password hash against known leaked hashes (from have I been pwned for example) and block it

[–] RustyNova@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I once had to reset my password as the new one got truncated without telling me.

Yes. It was deemed too long.

It was for an company that got plenty of my personal data

[–] cron@feddit.org 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Why on earth would someone truncate a password? I could make at least 10 more memea about bad handling of passwords

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Why? Probably some wild row length limit being hit where a table storing user data was storing an asinine amount of data, just terrible DB organization in an org where someone said “who even needs a DBA.”

How? If you can truncate user passwords, you should never handle user passwords again, unless you’re a student or hobbyist learning a valuable lesson.

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago (5 children)

How? If you can truncate user passwords, you should never handle user passwords again, unless you’re a student or hobbyist learning a valuable lesson.

Yeah. The real reason to be alarmed is worse than the obvious one.

If a partial version of what was originally set actually works later, it implies a scary chance they're not even hashing the password before storing it.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I think it's a nonzero chance they're not hashing it. Pretty much every hashing function, in the interest of preventing collisions, provides vastly different responses on small amounts of input. Even if they were hashing it, it would just appear to be the same password in a situation where they somehow got a collision, but again, the column length for passwords would always be fixed since a hash function always outputs the same data length.

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[–] marcos@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

There's no good reason. Whoever did it, did it for a bad reason. (Oh, well, there's no good reason until you reach several thousand characters.)

That said, it could be worse. Some sites do not truncate your password at the creation form, and only truncate it on the login screen. (Yeah, that happened to me, in 2 different sites.)

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Why is it always the one's for whom security is of utmost importance?

Login to meme account to share shitposting on the internet: top notch up to date security.

Login to the bank who actually handle my money: Clown ass security practices on obsolete infrastructure.

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Yep, one of mine was the federal government's bounds buying portal...

They improved since then, but it's always the entity that holds your money or oversees your health...

[–] GrabtharsHammer@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This often happens when you entered the right password but have a typo in the user name. Everyone tries the password again, but nobody spell checks their email or username.

[–] cron@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago

You're right, this is plausible

[–] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 1 points 1 week ago

What about my banking app????

Six digits!!! Only six digits!!!

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

this is probably some half of the site is silently truncating the password, while the other half isn't

[–] iamjackflack@lemm.ee 3 points 6 days ago

Or adding a space because pasting. That happens a lot too

[–] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago

It's surprisingly often that the login page doesn't use the same password processing code as the password reset/account creation pages, and it can be very frustrating at times.

[–] villainy@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I had this happen once where input validation on login and password change were different. I was allowed to set my password to a string containing a special character not accepted by the login form. Top men.

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've had a similar experience with a service that automatically truncated passwords if they were too long

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Note that for others reading this, what normal people think of as too long probably doesn't signify. Some asshat somewhere may have decided greater than something like 8 characters is "too long." Without telling you. Said asshat may indeed even be on the database side, and concluded somehow that varchar(8) should be sufficient for storing passwords. Right???

It is not only easy for flagrantly badly designed web systems to display this behavior, but also depressingly common. And more closely the page or system you're using is related to your local government, the probability of it being hilariously incompetently designed moves ever closer to becoming 1.

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Ya know what's actually even more absurd? The password was truncated on creation. The webpage allowed me to type 36 characters into the field, then only saved the first 30 of them.

I verified the full 36 character password before creating the account, and was immediately met with "wrong password." Noticed the 30 character limit when looking at the password change form, and tried cutting the last 6 characters off my existing password, which unfortunately was successful.

[–] Wolf314159@startrek.website 1 points 5 days ago

They must have been storing your password in plaintext on their end in order for that to work.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

So not only did somebody forget a maxlength=30 on the field, but their validation on the server side was also crap. Genius!

[–] Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I have some weird mental block regarding starting to use them. I really should stop procrastinating.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Get your shit together bro. Wtf are you even doing with your life. They're free ffs.

[–] cron@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago

Yes, please get a password manager. This improves both security and ease of use.

[–] LarsIsCool@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Start using it! You dont have to insert all your passwords immediately. It can naturally grow, minimizing startup cost

[–] pixelscript@lemm.ee 1 points 6 days ago

It's kinda neat when you do, though. For the obvious reason, of course. But I find also that it has the extra feature of showing you all at once just how many accounts you really have.

For most people who use the Internet, I expect it's easily dozens, perhaps over a hundred. It is truly no wonder why people reuse passwords or rely on simple algorithmic tricks to remember passwords, there is literally no way the common person could develop a unique secure password on their own for all of these services and recall all of them. A secure password manager is truly the only reasonable solution.

[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Lol I usually abort the password reset flow and try to login with the same password lmao

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I've never really understood why most systems are set up to reject a password reset if it's the same password. Is there a security issue there that I'm not picking up on?

It seems like they should just let you reset your password anyway if you've reached that screen (usually using some kind of authorisation, like using a link with a token in it that gets emailed to you or something).

[–] LarsIsCool@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The security risk I see is that the cause of you resetting your password could be that it is leaked. For that case, it is good to remind the user that they shouldn't override it with their current password. That said it would be nice to have a "I know what I am doing" option and allow it anyway

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

If you forgot your password and are trying to reset it with the exact same password you forgot, then you obviously don't know what you are doing.

[–] rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

Ah, that's a great point!

[–] cron@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

Having a "change password" option that allows you to not change your password would be somewhat strange ;)

[–] CidVicious@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As someone who regularly uses a vpn, I've noticed that there's a surprising number of sites that will just lock your account if they decide they don't like your ip address.

Yeah, I hate that. They don't always lock it but will just reject the password with no indication of why.

[–] Majorllama@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's like when you are trying to blindly install a USB type A . First orientation is wrong so you flip it. Second orientation is wrong so you get confused and flip it again only for it work easily lol.

[–] fulg@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

The joke I’ve heard is that USB cables exist in 4 dimensions, that’s why you need to flip them around twice before they connect.

[–] princess@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

They could be truncating the password in one form but not the other.

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