[Discuss] A Little OT: The Password Post-It

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (jc at trillian.mit.edu)]

Drew Van Zandt wrote:
| I think if I were designing the perfect password requirements, it would
| look something like:
| * IT has a password-crack server with a good dictionary, which includes
| names, sports teams, etc., all the trimmings a good password crack attempt
| needs.
| * No stupid password rules, but the server rolls through and tries to crack
| passwords, with a focus on new/recently changed passwords.  If it finds it,
| user has to change their password.

Some years ago, I worked on a  project  where  we  decided  to  do  this.   I
collected a number of password-cracker programs, and wrote a little script to
feed them all the encrypted passwords in the  /etc/passwd  file.   The  users
would  get  messages of the form "Your password is so weak that we decoded it
in $t seconds.  Your password is: $pswd.  We suggest that you change it."

This was fairly effective, actually.  Except with managers. ;-)

But it does nothing about  the  general  problem  of  our  growing  lists  of
passwords,  each satisfying a different set of rules for a different account.
This is the problem that forces users to write passwords in a  location  that
they  can  easily get at when they need a password.  As long as this is true,
security of the passwords themselves will continue to be somewhat irrelevant.


--
  The fewer jobs a tool is designed to do, the better it does each of them.
     _'
     O
   <:#/>  John Chambers
     +   <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
    /#\  <jc1742 at gmail.com>
    | |