Not only does the credit bureau max out their password length, you have a small list of available non-alphanumeric characters you can use, and no spaces. Also you cannot used a plused email address, and it had an issue with my self hosted email alias, forcing me to use my gmail address.
Both Experian and transunion had no password length limitations, nor did they require my username be my email address.
Update: I have been unable to log into my account for the last 3 days now. Every time I try I get a page saying to call customer service. After a total of 2 hours on hold I finally found the issue, you cannot connect to Equifax using a VPN. In addition there is no option for 2FA (not even email or sms) and they will hang up on you if you push the issue of their security being lax. Their reasoning for lax security and no vpn usage is “well all of our other customers are okay with this”.
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I had an account there with a proton email address and suddenly I couldn’t log in anymore. After 6 months of calling, someone finally told me proton emails are blocked because they are not secure. So I changes it to a tutanota email
What a clusterf**k
I almost used my proton mail because I can create an alias, where equifax would not accept a plused gmail account.
I always get a chuckle when financial institutions have requirements like these, or lack 2FA. My Lemmy account has more security at this point.
short passwords because they are trying to save bandwidth for their next time their entire database structure is downloaded
They’re supposed to be hashed so that shouldn’t matter
Unless that’s the joke or something
The 20 character length limit is so annoying because I once had 2 distinct passwords (not in use anymore) that were both coincidentally 21 characters long. Character limiting me by a single character at the end of those old passwords was annoying because I usually ended up, for some services I needed, having to change up and use a completely new password. Back when I was a lot worse about reusing passwords than now.
I swear password restrictions are getting to the point where there’s eventually going to only be one usable password.
Yeah, it’s counterproductive to lay out a bunch of restrictions. Let people make a long-ass password that’s a memorable phrase - it’s safer anyway.
Although I don’t know how anyone makes it without a password manager at this point.
Password reuse. Password reuse everywhere.
We’re all guilty of it. No shame in admitting it. I know I’ve been guilty of it from time to time.
When I have to sign up for something on my phone I will use my pre Bitwarden default password. Then once I have a sec to sit down iPad or laptop I will change it to something more secure.
I am currently fighting with my wife and children to start using a password manager.
What’s the best password manager you’d recommend?
I have only used lastpass (they have had several breeches and I do not recommend them), Bitwarden (my current daily driver and my recommendation), and I have used Apple keychain a little for passwords at work that my wife can access without having full access to my Bitwarden.
Thank you!
On your phone, you can select autofill, then ask bitwarden to generate a password, save and use that to register
The funny thing about that is that I am currently on my laptop getting keepassxc set up. This post has somehow motivated me to finally get a password manager.
If it converts one person that is a good thing.
At least they show you their requirements. Usually I use passwords with up to 150 characters (including special ones). Getting a vague response like “Password is invalid” is so annoying. I then have to remove special characters and reduce the length step by step until it is accepted by the website. (But 20 characters is way too short, resulting in these hilarious other requirements. You just want to create an account, without having to do a PhD in creating passwords first.)
Twitch is bad about this. It’s not a fucking ballistic missile installation - just tell me what you want.
There shouldn’t be an arbitrary limit on the length of a password but how is 20 characters “way too short”? It’s more than 10^36 combinations.
It doesn’t even matter. Because the limit implies that they don’t hash and salt their passwords.
Plus they had a breach already in 2017.
yep. you are right.
Imagine having to contract with a company in order for them not to fuck your life up with your own data. This is ridiculous.
You signed a contract? Pretty sure they’re going to fuck it up either way and they definitely have all your data.
that they collect without your explicit consent
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only reason to limit password length, is to save carrying cost on the database. But the only reason that this would be value added, is if the passwords are encrypted in reversible encryption, instead of hashed. Isn’t this against some CISA recommendation?
There may also be a (very weak) reason around bounds checking and avoiding buffer overflows. By rejecting anything longer that 20 characters, the developer can be sure that there will be nothing longer sent to the back end code. While they should still be doing bounds checking in the rest of the code, if the team making the UI is not the same as the team making the back end code, the UI team may see it as a reasonable restriction to prevent a screw up, further down the stack, from being exploited. Again, it’s a very weak argument, but I can see such an argument being made in a large organization with lots of teams who don’t talk to each other. Or worse yet, different contractors standing up the front end and back end.
They really shouldn’t be sending the password over the line at all. It should be local hashed/salted, encrypted, and then sent. So plaintext length really shouldn’t matter much, if at all. But I see your point.
Even then, the difference between 20 and 2000 characters is negligible
One other reason I could see is pure idiocy. Like I’ve seen that there is a bias to using every feature some software has, and if a max limit can be set, it will be set, to a “reasonable” value.
Maybe it’s also a “it’s the way we’ve always done it” BS that plays into it, too?
I’ve seen even shorter limits. Still annoying.
I happened to freeze all my credit in the same weekend I switched car insurance so I don’t know who is to blame (my bet is on GEICO) but starting Monday I’ve been getting a bunch of spam calls and texts…
Such scumbags… If it’s the credit agencies they caused the problem for me to be there and are now profiting off the “solution” and if it’s GEICO it’s probably worse since I’m already fucking paying them, but no they need more.
Just a quick tip: I’ve had good luck getting insurance through a broker. I have cheaper insurance through some B2B place that doesn’t work directly with consumers with better coverage than if I went through some national brand that spends millions of dollars a month on advertising to consumers. The other benefit of a broker is now you have a third party who’s incentivized to not only find you the best deal but also someone you can get advice from during a claim should anything seem off to you.
Thanks for the tip! I’ll have to look into that.
Huh - they increased it!
I have seen this on a site before and I never understood why. Whats the point of limiting the length of the password? Its not to save storage space since the plain text isnt stored and the hash should be a uniform length. So whats the advantage?
Calculating hashes is supposedly more expensive for longer strings. That could be used to simplify some kind of overload attack like DDOS.
If they’re not already rate-limiting login attempts that’s another huge problem…
If they’re using md5 (which would be in line with their security practices), the block size is 512 bits. That means that everything less than 64 characters is the same cost
I’m not sure I’d accept a bet on that assumption.
Their backend is really, REALLY garbage. Maybe it is some of that Microsoft trash that they snake oil’d into a lot of public offices and dumbass corpo managers, but whatever is running that site, has me concerned. You don’t do fucky things with passwords unless your backend is doing something really stupid.
A 20 character password of case insensitive letters and numbers is quite unbreakable (taking billions of years to brute force). Still, what a strange way to announce your database is old and you probably aren’t hashing your password with anything stronger than MD5. Or worse.
A hash has a fixed length, including MD5. There’s no reason to cap password (input) Iength. You can hash the whole bible and still get the same length hash. So either they don’t even hash it, they’re idiots, or they try to be unnecessarily cautious to avoid some other limit / overflow, like POST max size (which would still be counted in at least KB, not several characters). The limit on what special characters you can use is also highly suspicious - that’s not how you deal with injections / escaping your inputs.
Hashing takes longer the longer the string is, so it technically could impact performance if many people with very long passwords log in simultaneously. 20 characters is ridiculous though, you could probably cap it at hundreds and still be completely fine.
My default is to generate a 32 character password and store it in a password manager. Doesn’t matter to me how many characters it has since I’m just going to copy and paste it anyway.
Pretty surprising how many places enforce shorter passwords though… I had a bank that had a maximum character limit of 12. I don’t bank with them anymore. Short password limits is definitely is an indicator of bad underlying security practices.
Open a bug report