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Impressed with Vogons Password Security

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First post, by BinaryDemon

Posted on 
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Rank Oldbie
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Oldbie

Hi Vogons Admins,

So recently forgot my password, went thru the password reset routine. The temporary password assigned via email was 235 characters long! Honestly I thought it was a glitch. I've never seen online banking, credit card, corporate accounts use anything more than 16 characters. But sure enough I pasted the 235 character string into the password box, got access to my account and was able to change to a more memorable password. I didnt do it multiple times, its probably a random sized string between 13-255 characters and I just happened to get one of the larger outcomes. Either way, I'm impressed.

Also imagine the pain if someone was in a situation were they couldn't copy / paste that string. 😀

Thanks,
BinaryDemon

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Reply 1 of 2, by dr_st

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l33t

That's fine.

A funny story. Back in the early days of WiFi, people were saying that even with WPA2, short passphrases are "not secure enough", and recommended a randomly generated passcode of at least 64 characters. "How am I supposed to type this bullsh!t every time?" - people asked. "D'uh! You're not supposed to! You just put it in a file on a flash drive and copy&paste on every machine!"

This all worked nice and well, while computers were the only devices on your WiFi. Now that every household has 10+ mobile phones / tablets, SmartTVs, security cameras, robotic vaccum cleaners, and what not - each with its own quirky interface of inputting passwords... good luck using the "file on a flash drive" approach there.

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Reply 2 of 2, by mothergoose729

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That's an interesting approach. Longer strings are harder to brute force, but there are other ways to prevent that and you don't need more than about 11 characters anyway. I guess you can't be too careful 😁.

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