this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Same reason some websites still have max password lengths of 12 characters: Bad programmers that don't know what they're doing when it comes to the most basic of security concepts.
Bullshit requirements like that come from product managers.
Programmers would rather be lazy and not have to implement a limit anyway
It goes both ways: Programmers have a responsibility to inform PMs how bad of an idea short max password lengths are. And if they're still absolutely forced to implement it anyway, do you really want to be working somewhere that goes out of their way to purposefully implement poor security and somewhere that doesn't respect serious concerns raised from their engineers?
This one always surprises me. Who the fuck is not hashing passwords? What else is wrong with this site if such basic concepts are ignored?
[deleted]
or sometime they do hash the password but they are just ignorant of how it works so they keep the limit regardless
If you use a proper password hash function, and some joker submits a million-character password, you've got a denial-of-service attack.
The limit doesn't have to be 12 characters, but there does need to be a limit.
Why would that be a DOS? The hash of something is always the same length. Might only take a bit more time to compute, but a million characters isn't that much with modern hardware. If anything, the risk of collisions would be higher.
Hashing is typically done server-side. So you need to transmit the password to the server and you can't have a truly unlimited data limit. Pretty much every web server will reject requests over some size so while it's entirely reasonable to support something like a 1,000 char password if you really wanted to, having it be truly unlimited with something using a 10 million character password is a security/operational risk in itself.
https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/sep/15/security/