Make your password strong, with a unique jumble of letters, numbers and punctuation marks, but memorize it — never write it down and, oh yes, change it every few months.
These instructions are supposed to protect us, but they don’t.
Some computer security experts are advancing the heretical thought that passwords might not need to be “strong,” or changed constantly. They say onerous requirements for passwords have given us a false sense of protection against potential attacks. In fact, they say, we aren’t paying enough attention to more potent threats.
Here’s one threat to keep you awake at night — keylogging software. It is deposited on a PC by a virus, records all the keystrokes — including the strongest passwords you can concoct — and then sends the data surreptitiously to a remote location.
“Keeping a keylogger off your machine is about a trillion times more important than the strength of any one of your passwords,” says Cormac Herley, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research who specializes in security-related topics.
He said antivirus software could detect and block many kinds of keyloggers, but “there’s no guarantee that it gets everything.”
After investigating password requirements in a variety of settings, Herley is critical not of users, but of system administrators who aren’t paying enough attention to the inconvenience of making people comply with arcane rules.
“It is not users who need to be better educated on the risks of various attacks, but the security community,” he said at a meeting of security professionals, the New Security Paradigms Workshop, at Queen’s College in Oxford, England. “Security advice simply offers a bad cost-benefit trade-off to users.”
One might guess that heavily trafficked Web sites — especially those that provide access to users’ financial information — would have requirements for strong passwords, but it turns out that password policies of many such sites are among the most relaxed.
These sites don’t publicly discuss security breaches, but Herley said it “isn’t plausible” that these sites would use such policies if their users weren’t adequately protected from attacks by those who do not know the password.
Herley, working with Dinei Florencio, also at Microsoft Research, looked at the password policies of 75 Web sites. At the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, held in July in Redmond, Washington, they reported that the sites that allowed relatively weak passwords were busy commercial destinations, including PayPal, Amazon.com and Fidelity Investments. The sites that insisted on very complex passwords were mostly government and university sites.
What accounts for the difference?
They suggest that “when the voices that advocate for usability are absent or weak, security measures become needlessly restrictive.”
Donald Norman, one of the cofounders of the Nielsen Norman Group, a design consulting firm in Fremont, California, makes a similar case.
In “When Security Gets in the Way”, an essay published last year in Interactions, he noted the password rules of Northwestern University, where he then taught. It was a daunting list of 15 requirements. He said unreasonable rules can end up rendering a system less secure — users end up writing down passwords and storing them in places that can be readily discovered.
“These requirements keep out the good guys without deterring the bad guys,” he said.
Northwestern has reduced its password requirements to eight, but they still constitute a challenging maze. For example, the password can’t have more than four sequential characters from the previous seven passwords and a new password is required every 120 days.
By contrast, Amazon.com has only one requirement — that the password be at least six characters. That’s it, and you can hold on to it as long as you like.
A short password wouldn’t work well if an attacker could try every possible combination in quick succession, but as Herley and Florencio note, commercial sites can block “brute-force attacks” by locking an account after a given number of failed log-in attempts.
“If an account is locked for 24 hours after three unsuccessful attempts, a six-digit PIN can withstand 100 years of sustained attack,” they wrote.
Roger Safian, a senior data security analyst at Northwestern University, says that unlike Amazon, the university is unfortunately vulnerable to brute-force attacks in that it doesn’t lock out accounts after failed log-ins. The reason, he says, is that anyone could use a lockout policy to try logging in to a victim’s account, “knowing that you won’t succeed, but also knowing that the victim won’t be able to use the account, either.”
(Such thoughts may occur to a student facing an unwelcome exam, who could block a professor from preparations.)
Very short passwords, taken directly from the dictionary, would be permitted in a password system that Herley and Stuart Schechter at Microsoft Research developed with Michael Mitzenmacher at Harvard University.
At the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Security conference, held last month in Washington, the three suggested that Web sites with tens or hundreds of millions of users could let users choose any password they liked —as long as only a tiny percentage selected the same one. That would render a list of most often used passwords useless by limiting a single password to, say, 100 users among 10 million, the odds of an attacker getting lucky on one attempt per account are astronomically long, Herley explained in a conversation last month.
Herley said the proposed system hadn’t been tested and that users might become frustrated in trying to select a password that was no longer available, but he said he believed an anything-is-permitted password system would be welcomed by users sick of being told: “Eat your broccoli, a strong password is good for security.”
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley, California, and a professor of business at San Jose State University.
I came to Taiwan to pursue my degree thinking that Taiwanese are “friendly,” but I was welcomed by Taiwanese classmates laughing at my friend’s name, Maria (瑪莉亞). At the time, I could not understand why they were mocking the name of Jesus’ mother. Later, I learned that “Maria” had become a stereotype — a shorthand for Filipino migrant workers. That was because many Filipino women in Taiwan, especially those who became house helpers, happen to have that name. With the rapidly increasing number of foreigners coming to Taiwan to work or study, more Taiwanese are interacting, socializing and forming relationships with
Whether in terms of market commonality or resource similarity, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co is the biggest competitor of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). The two companies have agreed to set up factories in the US and are also recipients of subsidies from the US CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law by former US president Joe Biden. However, changes in the market competitiveness of the two companies clearly reveal the context behind TSMC’s investments in the US. As US semiconductor giant Intel Corp has faced continuous delays developing its advanced processes, the world’s two major wafer foundries, TSMC and
The recent termination of Tibetan-language broadcasts by Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a significant setback for Tibetans both in Tibet and across the global diaspora. The broadcasts have long served as a vital lifeline, providing uncensored news, cultural preservation and a sense of connection for a community often isolated by geopolitical realities. For Tibetans living under Chinese rule, access to independent information is severely restricted. The Chinese government tightly controls media and censors content that challenges its narrative. VOA and RFA broadcasts have been among the few sources of uncensored news available to Tibetans, offering insights
We are witnessing a sea change in the government’s approach to China, from one of reasonable, low-key reluctance at rocking the boat to a collapse of pretense over and patience in Beijing’s willful intransigence. Finally, we are seeing a more common sense approach in the face of active shows of hostility from a foreign power. According to Article 2 of the 2020 Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法), a “foreign hostile force” is defined as “countries, political entities or groups that are at war with or are engaged in a military standoff with the Republic of China [ROC]. The same stipulation applies to
RSS