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?
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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Why on earth would someone truncate a password? I could make at least 10 more memea about bad handling of passwords
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.
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.
Also suggests the user may be reusing the same prefix if only the changed bits are getting truncated.
Should use different random passwords every time. Completely random or a random string of words. While it doesn't solve the cleartext password storage issue, a data breach won't compromise all your other accounts to same degree.
Doesn't hurt to also randomize usernames, emails, and even security question answers.
edit: or my new favorite passkeys, just make sure you trust whatever tool is managing your private keys.
Not how password hashing works. Demonstrated with sha256:
hunter2butitsreallylong:a9953dfbfec699349341edc857dcfe5c7a617c81f312cf57297d5b852881bab3hunter2:f52fbd32b2b3b86ff88ef6c490628285f482af15ddcb29541f94bcf526a3f6c7a hash algorithm encompasses all provided data and returns a single fixed length data response
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function
Any changes, even just removing a few characters, drastically changes the output of the hash function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect)
You have no way of knowing a user password when you are storing hashes, you can't truncate them, and the user password length doesn't matter (up to a certain point where it's technologically dumb to hash user input over a certain amount of data)
I do agree however that changing / randomizing your password is important, as someone brute forcing or running rainbow tables etc on a hash dump can quickly attack a common password across different dumps