The continued existence of World Password Day is a tell that something has gone badly wrong in cybersecurity.
Now in its tenth year, the day is supposed to act as an annual reminder for people to follow good password hygiene: Don’t reuse passwords; use long passwords; no, longer passwords than that; use a collection of random words; no, not those words; use a phrase; use a collection of phrases; don’t forget the weird characters; etc., etc.
This is bad. Critical technology should not require an annual pep talk to function correctly. There is no annual “how to avoid nuclear meltdown” day.
And make no mistake, password authentication is critical technology. It is the bedrock on which security is built. Fail at authentication and it doesn’t matter how “military-grade” your encryption is or if you patch twice a day before flossing, you’re toast.
The existence of World Password Day is a symptom of two problems.
The first is that password authentication is a terrible design. Its success hinges on humans being good at something humans are really bad at: Creating and remembering long strings of random characters.
In an environment where users must now remember about 100 passwords each, it is impossible to use passwords well without assistance. The only chance you have of making it work is to outsource the “creating and remembering” part you’re really bad at to a computer, in the form of some password management software.
Password managers are great—apart from where they aren’t, like when you’re logging in to Windows—but from what we can tell, most people still don’t use password managers, and those that do are almost certainly the most security-aware among us; in other words, the folks who need its help the least.
And when I write “impossible” I am not being hyperbolic. You cannot remember 100, different, strong passwords. You just can’t. Almost all of us run into serious problems juggling fewer than ten. (If you’re still doubtful, read Why (almost) everything we told you about passwords was wrong, it’s got more details and links to the research.)
The second problem is that for too long we made passwords a problem for users to solve instead a problem for IT or security. Dispersing the responsibility like this created an enormous headache that has consumed untold resources. A system is only as strong as its worst password choice, but we almost never know what the worst choice is or who made it. That creates a situation where improving security rests on our ability to improve every single user in the hope that we’ll reach the worst.
Attempts to level up users often boil down to edicts about how to do passwords better, such as making sure each password includes a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, and that passwords are not reused.
It’s like we asked the janitor to configure the firewall rules and then tried to fix our terrible mistake by having a firewall expert constantly lecture the janitor about not messing up the firewall.
Repeated password breaches over decades—which show us real users’ password choices—suggest that these edicts are having little effect. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Reusing passwords and making passwords simpler may be bad for security, but they make perfect sense if your most pressing problem is working out how to juggle an unmanageably large portfolios of passwords.
Our experiment in shifting responsibility and blame to users hasn’t worked. Ransomware gangs rely routinely on phished, stolen, or guessed passwords to break into corporate networks through VPNs or remote desktops, causing untold damage and disruption.
The good news is that while there isn’t much we can do about problem number one, number two was a choice, and it’s a choice we can un-make. There is another way, but it requires a shift in mindset.
Instead of thinking about how to get users to choose stronger passwords, businesses should focus on protecting themselves from users’ poor password choices instead.
The most powerful way to do this is to remove passwords entirely. Thankfully, after decades of false starts, a slew of technologies like Apple’s Touch ID, Windows Hello, and FIDO2 has appeared that now make this a viable option in a number of areas.
Passwords are going to be with us for a long time yet though, so we still need ways to cope with bad ones where passwordless authentication is unavailable.
Where you can’t abandon passwords, the next best option is multi-factor authentication (MFA). In 2019, Microsoft’s Alex Weinert wrote that “Based on our studies, your account is more than 99.9% less likely to be compromised if you use MFA.”
MFA comes in different flavors and your choice of flavor makes a difference: Hardware keys are better than push notifications from an app, which are better than One-Time Password (OTP) codes from an app, which are better than OTP codes over SMS. But the improvements that come in the steps between the different forms of MFA are incremental. The step between MFA of any kind and no MFA at all is transformational.
More than any other choice or technology, MFA puts the responsibility for password security back into the hands of IT and security specialists where it belongs.
There are other measures, too. When you go to an ATM you don’t have to type in a 14-character password with eight quattuordecillion (that’s a number with 45 zeroes at the end of it) possible combinations to get your money—a 4-digit PIN with a paltry 10,000 possible combinations will do.
Why? Because the ATM isn’t going to give an attacker 10,000 chances to guess the correct PIN, it’s going to give them three, and then it’s going to eat the card. The same thing happens on your iPhone. Six wrong guesses and you’re on the naughty step. Ten wrong guesses and your data can self-destruct.
No normal user is going to make hundreds of guesses at their password before phoning support, so take a leaf out of your bank’s playbook and give your users a handful of chances to enter their password correctly.
Like MFA, account lockouts allow users to stay secure even with truly awful password choices. (After all, EVERY 4-digit PIN is a terrible password choice.)
In the interests of defense in depth, businesses may still want to ensure that users are making strong passwords, or at least avoiding weak ones. Here, the thinking has changed in the last decade, and that change is enshrined in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Digital Identity Guidelines.
Forcing people to create passwords to a formula, insisting on at least one uppercase letter, at least one special character etc, is out. And so are periodic password resets. Both are far more effective at annoying users than they are at improving security.
Instead, NIST says, it’s more effective to simply stop users choosing known bad passwords, such as passwords that have appeared in breaches or that are based on dictionary words.
If you are going to insist on strong passwords, please make a password manager part of the standard software suite on all your organization’s machines, and make sure employees actually know how to use it. Many users simply don’t trust password managers, and unless you’ve sat with somebody using one for the first time, you may not appreciate how difficult it can be for people to make sense of them.
The measures I’ve suggested in this article are not interchangeable or equally effective: You should start at the top and work down. If you do that, you can improve password security, remove the need for toothless edicts, and perhaps we can finally get rid of these annual pep talks.
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