Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ev…
I think I agree, but short passwords like “x”, “69”, “420”, “abcd”, “12345” etc. would take a very short time to brute-force… Is your take that even if these are allowed, it will make all other passwords of the site more secure, since it adds more possibilities to the list where nothing can be disregarded when trying to brute-force any other password?
Yes that’s exactly it. When you reduce the total space of possible passwords you are giving a brute force attack unnecessary hints to improve their attempts with. A weak password will always be a weak password, so single digits or obvious or popular patterns should be avoided, but this should be a matter of user education rather than a hard and fast rule for account creation.
Limiting the length of a password (at least to something as low as 16 characters) sounds like an unnecessary, bad idea…
Placing any restrictions at all on what makes a valid password is an unnecessary, bad idea.
I think I agree, but short passwords like “x”, “69”, “420”, “abcd”, “12345” etc. would take a very short time to brute-force… Is your take that even if these are allowed, it will make all other passwords of the site more secure, since it adds more possibilities to the list where nothing can be disregarded when trying to brute-force any other password?
Yes that’s exactly it. When you reduce the total space of possible passwords you are giving a brute force attack unnecessary hints to improve their attempts with. A weak password will always be a weak password, so single digits or obvious or popular patterns should be avoided, but this should be a matter of user education rather than a hard and fast rule for account creation.