this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
742 points (98.2% liked)

Asklemmy

43856 readers
2267 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy πŸ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It's 2023, why are websites actively preventing pasting into fields like passwords and credit card number boxes? I use a password manager for security, it's recommended by my employer to use one, and it even avoids human error like accidentally fat-fingering keys, and best of all with the credit card number I don't have to memorize anything or know a single digit/character!

I have to use the Don't Fuck With Paste addon just to be able to paste my secrets into certain monthly billing websites; why is my electric provider and one of my banks so asinine that pasting cannot be allowed? I can only imagine downsides and zero upsides to this toxic dark-pattern behavior.

There is even a mention about this in NIST SP 800-63B, a standard for identity management that some companies must follow in the USA, which mentions forcefully rotating passwords and denying "password paste-in" as antiquated/bad advice:

Verifiers SHOULD permit claimants to use β€œpaste” functionality when entering a memorized secret. This facilitates the use of password managers, which are widely used and in many cases increase the likelihood that users will choose stronger memorized secrets

Edit: I discovered that for Firefox users there's a simpler way than exposing your secrets to someone's third-party addon. Simply open about:config, search for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, and change it from true to false.

Edit 2: As some have pointed out, that config value interferes with regular functionality on some sites. Probably best to leave it alone unless you know what you're doing.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Pechente@feddit.de 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?

[–] Caaaaarrrrlll@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] Pika@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

or sometime they do hash the password but they are just ignorant of how it works so they keep the limit regardless

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] foo@withachanceof.com 3 points 1 year ago

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.