Schneier - NIST Recommends Some Common-Sense Password Rules

NIST’s second draft of its “SP 800-63-4“—its digital identify guidelines—finally contains some really good rules about passwords:

The following requirements apply to passwords:

  1. lVerifiers and CSPs SHALL require passwords to be a minimum of eight characters in length and SHOULD require passwords to be a minimum of 15 characters in length.
  2. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD permit a maximum password length of at least 64 characters.
  3. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept all printing ASCII [RFC20] characters and the space character in passwords.
  4. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters in passwords. Each Unicode code point SHALL be counted as a signgle character when evaluating password length.
  5. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords.
  6. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically. However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.
  7. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT permit the subscriber to store a hint that is accessible to an unauthenticated claimant.
  8. Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT prompt subscribers to use knowledge-based authentication (KBA) (e.g., “What was the name of your first pet?”) or security questions when choosing passwords.
  9. Verifiers SHALL verify the entire submitted password (i.e., not truncate it).

Hooray.

News article.



from Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/nist-recommends-some-common-sense-password-rules.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

KnowBe4 - Scam Of The Week: "When Users Add Their Names to a Wall of Shame"

Image
Eric Howes , KnowBe4 Principal Lab Researcher, found out about another insidious bad guy trick: " If you work in IT there has undoubtedly come a dark moment when you wondered to yourself just who among your employee users would be gullible enough to click through a phishing email and potentially bring down your organization. from KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Blog https://blog.knowbe4.com/when-users-add-their-names-to-a-wall-of-shame
Read more

Krebs - NY Charges First American Financial for Massive Data Leak

Image
In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had exposed approximately 885 million records related to mortgage deals going back to 2003. On Wednesday, regulators in New York announced that First American was the target of their first ever cybersecurity enforcement action in connection with the incident, charges that could bring steep financial penalties. First American Financial Corp. Santa Ana, Calif.-based  First American [ NYSE:FAF ] is a leading provider of title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. It employs some 18,000 people and brought in $6.2 billion in 2019 . As first reported here last year , First American’s website exposed 16 years worth of digitized mortgage title insurance records — including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images. The docum
Read more

US-CERT - SB18-169: Vulnerability Summary for the Week of June 11, 2018

Original release date: June 18, 2018 The US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin provides a summary of new vulnerabilities that have been recorded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD) in the past week. The NVD is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) / United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). For modified or updated entries, please visit the NVD , which contains historical vulnerability information. The vulnerabilities are based on the CVE vulnerability naming standard and are organized according to severity, determined by the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) standard. The division of high, medium, and low severities correspond to the following scores: High - Vulnerabilities will be labeled High severity if they have a CVSS base score of 7.0 - 10.0 Medium - Vulnerabilities will be labeled Medium severity
Read more