The joy of repetition really is in you

[venta]

The other day, I was trying to sign into my Subway loyalty app. That's Subway the sandwich shop. They've changed their security model, and please would I pick a new password.

I have a generic password that I use for everything I don't really care about. It's a decent enough password (the sort of sites that tell you how strong your choice is usually put it at medium).

Subway rejected it: it had no capital letters. I tried a different one, which was rejected due to having no numbers. Ok, fine. I'll stick a capital in my generic password, and I'll doubtless forget I've done that and have to reset it in the future, but really who cares.

Subway rejected it because it had consecutive repeated characters. Wait, what? Does that rule actually achieve anything other than massively reducing the search space a potential hacker needs to hit?

To be honest, this is my feeling about all the "must have a capital", "must have a numerical digit" rule. It's quite possible to produce a strong password with neither. By enforcing these, you're just making my password very slightly easier to brute force.

Of course, given the general approach to passwords (see Ashley Madison's list of cracked passwords) I appreciate that the rules are there for a reason.

But "no repeated letters"? I don't get it.

Comments

[divergentcodex.livejournal.com]

Please excuse me while I setup a farm of machines in the cloud, devoted to cracking your subway password, because I could really do with a sandwich, and that's far easier than walking in the shop and buying a damn sandwich. Passwords are stupid.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ha! After all that effort, you will discover that I currently have a balance of zero points and am not even due a freebie :)