Password Security

Information security, including passwords and identities, has become one of the most important digital highlights of the last decade. With billions of people affected by data breaches each year, there's a greater need to introduce strong information security systems. If you think you've been part of a breach, or you want to check and see, you can use Have I Been Pwned to see if your email has been involved in any public breaches. Remember that there's a possibility that a company experienced a breach and did not report it to anyone.

The first place to start with any personal security check-up is to gather a list of all the different websites, apps, or programs that require you to have login credentials. Optionally, once you know where your information is being stored, you can sort the list from the most-important items such as banks or government logins to less important items such as your favorite meme site. You will want to ensure that your critical logins are secure before getting to the others.

Once you think you have a good idea of all your different authentication methods, I recommend using a password manager such as Bitwarden. Using a password manager allows you to automatically save your logins, create randomized passwords, and transfer passwords across devices. However, you'll need to memorize your "vault password" that allows you to open the password manager. It's important to make this something hard to guess since it would allow anyone who has it to access every password you've stored in there.

Personally, I recommend using a passphrase instead of a password for your vault password. Instead of using a string of characters (whether random or simple), use a phrase and add in symbols and a number. For example, your vault password could be Racing-Alphabet-Gourd-Parrot3. Swap the symbols out for whichever symbol you want, move the number around, and fine-tune the passphrase until you are confident that you can remember it whenever necessary.

Once you've stored your passwords, make sure you continually check up on your account and make sure you aren't following bad password practices. Krebs on Security has a great blog post on password recommendations. Any time that a data breach happens, make sure you check to see if you were included, and if you need to reset any account passwords.

When developing any password-protected application, there are a few basic rules that anyone should follow even if they do not follow any official guidelines such as NIST. The foremost practice is to require users to use passwords that are at least 8 characters and cannot easily be guessed. This sounds extremely simple, but it requires quite a few different strategies. First, the application should check the potential passwords against a dictionary of insecure passwords such password, 1234abc, or application_name.

Next, the application should offer guidance on the strength of passwords being entered during enrollment. Further, NIST officially recommends not* implementing any composition rules that make passwords hard to remember (e.g. passwords with letters, numbers, and special characters) and instead encouraging the use of long pass phrases which can include spaces. It should be noted that to be able to keep spaces within passwords, all unicode characters should be supported, and passwords should not be truncated.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US Department of Commerce regularly publishes information around information security and digital identity guidelines. Recently, NIST published Special Publication 800-63b: Digital Identity Guidelines and Authentication and Lifecycle Management.

A Memorized Secret authenticator - commonly referred to as a password or, if numeric, a PIN - is a secret value intended to be chosen and memorized by the user. Memorized secrets need to be of sufficient complexity and secrecy that it would be impractical for an attacker to guess or otherwise discover the correct secret value. A memorized secret is something you know.

• NIST Special Publication 800-63B

NIST offers a lot of guidance on passwords, but I'm going to highlight just a few of the important factors:

• Require passwords to be a minimum of 8 characters (6 characters if randomly generated and be generated using an approved random bit generator).
• Compare potential passwords against a list that contains values known to be commonly-used, expected, or compromised.
• Offer guidance on password strength, such as a strength meter.
• Implement a rate-limiting mechanism to limit the number of failed authentication attempts for each user account.
• Do not require composition rules for passwords and do not require passwords to be changed periodically (unless compromised).
• Allow pasting of user identification and passwords to facilitate the use of password managers.
• Allow users to view the password as it is being entered.
• Use secure forms of communication and storage, including salting and hashing passwords using a one-way key derivation function.

NIST offers further guidance on other devices that require specific security policies, querying for passwords, and more. All the information discussed so far comes from NIST SP800-63b but NIST offers a lot of information on digital identities, enrollment, identity proofing, authentication, lifecycle management, federation, and assertions in the total NIST SP800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines.