Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ars_technician 4590 days ago
Consider that you are just practicing cargo-cult security though. You just piled a bunch of password security recommendations parroted all over the Internet to the detriment of your users.

If you are using scrypt with a reasonable difficulty and a per-user salt, there is no reason to put the entropy restrictions, weak password restrictions, etc on your end-users. It is painful to interact with sites that enforce ridiculous password requirements.

You can get away with a 4 character password on Netflix. There is a reason for that. Security is much more subtle that password complexity.

1 comments

> Consider that you are just practicing cargo-cult security though.

No, I really am not. But as I didn't describe my reasons, you don't have the context to understand them.

Frankly, if Netflix has 4-character passwords, I would expect it to be relatively easy to compromise their accounts live with a carefully put together campaign. If Netflix gets their username/pw database dumped, I expect we'll see their policy change as the passwords are trivially cracked.

Not only that, putting together a safe & sane password retry system isn't the easiest thing every, and doing careful fraud detection based on geolocation/ip etc isn't the easist thing ever either. Particularly when I don't have someone working full-time on security.

Further, what you also didn't know is that the password strength functions as written have knobs I can adjust if things are too onerous.

So having harder passwords goes a long way towards 'better security' on the account side for little effort.

I would advise you to be more cautious about making unsubstantiated statements based on ignorance in the future.