And then some sites throw salt in the wound by requiring "at least one special character that is not # or % or whatever" so if you turn on special chars for your password generator, you have to manually filter through it to pull out said characters.

Or how about "Sorry, your password may be at most 12 characters long".

Grinds my bloody gears.

What irritates me more is knowing that the people who implement those solutions are probably here. Shame on you, go back and fix it right now!

My favorite faux security thing I have run observed in the wild:

Login with your password. Site then responds that we emailed you a security code, but the security code expires in five minutes. Immediately below that, it notes that the email may take up to four minutes to send. From experience, I think the note about slow emails is accurate.

Who spent more than 30 seconds on that implementation thinking it was acceptable? Note that this is for a stupid intra-company fitness tracking thing (ie, I do not care at all about this data). Confirmation codes from my bank have a 30 minute window, but that is evidently too lax for step counting.

AliExpress! They give you something like 30s to enter the "2FA" code to log in, only it takes ~20s for the SMS to get to me. Took me 3 tries.

* * *

Last time I was there, I actually couldn't get the login screen to appear. Clicking login grays the site out and draw 2 useless horizontal lines. Only clicking 'create account' and then switching to 'already have an account' gives me a login screen. As a bonus, mistranslations are so bad the text on the 'create account' and 'already have an account' are identical. You have to guess which dialog is which. All of this on firefox with ad blocker, maybe chrome is better.

Now that whole site has the weirdest bugs. When I go to the mailbox, the site switches to some eastern european language. The things we do for cheap electronic components ...

More likely, people who are here are forced to implement security policies adopted by cybersecurity teams that have long since left the company, and the current cyber teams have no incentive or desire to changed said policies.

Yeah, love how my bank has a password length requirement of "8 to 14 characters".

I always assume that those are because of some ancient database schema that they refuse to update. For example, COBOL records can be defined by column numbers, and if you store plain text with only 12 columns, you have a max length of 12.

If a password rule looks dumb enough, I sometimes try using something like this for a password:

'; DROP TABLE users; --

just for the lulz...

You just gave away your password to the world…

I don't think his password is actually ************ though ...

hunter2

Or you find one of those lovely sites where the password has a max length and they tell you it, but instead of validating, they truncate the password and save silently.

Oh, of course they truncate also the password confirmation field.

My favourite is when you enter a long password, and it fails with the error message "Your password must contain special characters" or some other message that nothing to do with the condition that is not met.

My favorite must have been the website that informed me that my password was invalid, when it actually didn't like my last name (forgot the specifics – I think that's because there was a dash in the name?)

Why does it even matter? Don't you use a password manager to generate passwords for you?

The strings generated by password managers are often incompatible with arbitrary requirements imposed by websites. You must use a symbol, but some symbols are forbidden and we're not going to tell you which ones! You can't have more than N consecutive numbers! Your password is too long! It must be exactly 15 characters long! etc. etc.

So I restrict my password manager to use what I consider to be a widely accepted subset of the printable characters, and then some random website will complain about the lack of this or that character. :(

Everybody who uses a password manager encounters stupid password rules regularily.

It matters, because it is annoying. Password security rules should achieve two goals:

1. Actually improve security

2. Make it easy for users to choose a good password

A password policy of "chose one or more lowercase, one or more uppercase, two or more numeric and at least one special character, but not the one that you have been thinking of" does not achieve that goal, especially if they limit the password length to 15 characters.

Just tell give them a reasonable minimum length, check against the most common passwords and their username and call it a day. If you need more security, increase the minimum length.

Maximum length should be chosen in a way that nobody who is not malicious will notice it (e.g. 128 chars or bigger).

This produces safe passwords, is understandable and people with password managers are served as well.

* * *