Why qwerty won’t cut it anymore
YEAR after year, passwords like “123456”, “qwerty” and even
“password” are found to be the most popular choices and 2021 was no exception.
These reports generally come with the same advice to users: create better passwords to protect your security online. Although this may well be true, it’s also time to realise that years of promoting this message has had little or no effect.
To improve things, we need to stop blaming people and instead put the onus on websites and services to encourage and enforce better “cyberhygiene”.
Of course, it’s easy to point the finger at the users – they’re ultimately the ones making the poor password choices. But at the same time, it’s now well known that people commonly make these choices. So it’s fair to assume that without guidance or restrictions to prevent weak passwords, they’re likely to continue with the same habits.
Nonetheless, we have successive generations of users who are not told what a good password looks like, nor prevented from making lazy choices.
It’s not hard to find examples of websites that will accept the very worst passwords without complaint.
It’s similarly easy to find sites that require users to create passwords – yet give them no guidance in doing so. Or sites that will offer feedback that a user’s password choice is weak, but allow it anyway.
If you’re responsible for running a website or a service that will accept the likes of “123456”, “qwerty” or “password”, it’s time to rethink your system. If you let users get away with bad choices, they will believe they are acceptable and continue this bad practice.
By implementing stronger protocols, you can help to address the problem at its source. Websites should have processes in place to filter out poor passwords – a “blacklist” of common choices.
And while it can be useful to offer guidance for users at the point of password creation, sites should stop insisting on things that authoritative organisations like the UK National Cyber Security Centre and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology now say ought not to be enforced.
For example, they advise against the requirement for password complexity (like including upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation).
Both organisations indicate that increasing password length is more important than complexity. This is because longer passwords are more resistant to brute force cracking (where attackers try all letter, number and symbol combinations to find a match) and less complex passwords can be easier to remember.
Yet many sites continue to demand complexity and impose upper limits on length, in the process often blocking perfectly reasonable password choices that our browsers and other tools can automatically generate for us.
You may wonder why this is important. One argument is that if a service is charged with protecting users’ personal data, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to allow users to leave themselves vulnerable by choosing weak passwords.
It’s also worth noting that in some cases one user’s weak password could give an attacker a foothold into the system from which to exploit other weaknesses and increase their access. So it’s arguably in the provider’s interest to minimise these opportunities and protect other people’s data in the process. | The Conversation
◆ Furnell is Professor of Cyber Security
at the University of Nottingham