dumb-password-rules / dumb-password-rules, Hacker News

Shaming sites with dumb password rules.

Contributing

Feel free to submit a pull request with dumb rules you’ve encountered.

See other sites for the formatting and follow these rules:

Include the name of the site with a link.
Add a clean comment about the dumb password rule (optional).
Include at least one screenshot.
Keep the sites in alphabetical order.

Sites

ADP

Forced to change the password during the first login. At least they could use proper grammar in their rule list.

Advanzia

Requires at least 6 to a maximum of 12 characters [sic!]
Allows only digits and letters without umlauts
Allows only specific special characters:? ! $ €% & * _=- . ,:; / () {} [] ~ @ #
Allows no spaces

American Express

Sometimes I forget that caps-lock is on, glad it doesn’t matter.

AmeriHealth

Their site says “All information is kept safe and secure.“Just not as secure as you’d like.

User Password must be between 6 and 14 characters and contain 1 numerical value.

AOL

Between 8 and 16, so I can’t go up to 20. Oh, and thanks for restricting one of the most common special characters!

Apple

Can’t contain 3 or more consecutive identical characters.

(Arbeitnehmeronline)

Service for managing employment documents of the German company Datev.

Only the following character categories are allowed: Letters, numbers and this special charaters set:! # $% & () * , -. / :;? @ [] ^ _ `{|} ~ äöüßÄÖÜ

Arlo

Your password contains characters not listed. Therefore, they do not match.

AT&T

The only special characters allowed are underscores and hyphens.

8 to 15 chars. No special chars allowed but requires special chars. Also requires lowercase, uppercase, and numbers. Consecutive chars are prohibited. Did I mention the page hangs while you type? That eye icon tho.

Battle.net

8 to 16 characters, at least one number and one letter and last but not least NO special characters , and can’t have a password that looks like your username too.

A real time travel adventure through the password rules of 2005!

Best Buy

You can enter whatever password you like! But you probably don’t want to make it too long, because you’ll break us and you’ll never be able to login again.

Blackrock

They force you to enter a password that has 8, 9, or 10 characters, then they lecture you on how to create a strong password.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts

16 maximum and no special characters. Protecting your US healthcare information.

BMO Bank of Montreal

Password must be exactly 6 characters long and no special character.

(BMW ConnectedDrive)

Although the prompt suggests good things, after many failed attempts to set a new password, it turns out you can ONLY use the special characters shown in the prompt

California Department of Motor Vehicles

They also prohibit pasting into the password field by using a JavaScriptalert ()whenever you right-click or press the (Ctrl) button, so you can’t use a password manager.

Chase Bank

We don’t even want you to login online.

Comcast

Your password should be difficult to guess as long as it’s not over 16 characters long.

Copyright.gov

I wonder if they cooperate with NSA to enforce the password rules.

Dell

Okay at least 6, that’s alright i guess. Oh at least one number and one letter, bit dumb but hey not that dumb.

But hiding the fact that it has a max of 20, now THAT is dumb!

Delta

It’s a good thing they don’t store personal information such as your passport number … oh wait.

DJI

The symbol is banned without a notice, it’ll probably escape whatever you’ll put in, just why …

Dutch Tax Authorities (Belastingdienst)

At least 8 and at most 25 characters, of which at least 3 of the characters were not used in the previous password. No more than 3 of the same characters. At least 1 upper case and 4 lower case characters. No more than 3 special characters.

It’s not like hashing passwords is a thing or something.

El Corte Ingles

Min 6 and max 8 characters for password! Can’t contain anything different than letters and numbers. Apart, the email address must have at least 8 characters (sorry million dollar domain owners!: D)

E-learning (Unipd)

Exactly 8 characters for password! There must be at least 1 lowercase letter, at least 1 uppercase letter, at least 1 number and at least 1specialchar (*,. $ # @ etc …).

Fidelity

No more than 20 characters and leave out characters commonly used by programmers. We don’t want you to hack the mainframe.

Global Entry

“Our duties are wide-ranging, and our goal is clear – keeping America safe. “

GoDaddy

Some characters are (too) ********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************* (special.)

GoDaddy SFTP

Max 14 characters for the most important password in your shared hosting environment.

Her Majestys Revenue & Customs (UK Tax)

We store basically all of your data, but we can’t store your password.

ING a dutch bank in almost 50 Countries

Max 20 characters, must have one number, one upper case character and one lower case character. You can only use certain special characters. When i asked about it they answer that it’s really hard to change it. When i asked if the password is saved as a hash or just plain they send the answer to the technical department this was march 2018.

Intel

Izly by Crous

Izly by Crous is animposedFrench payment service for the university. You can’t pay your daily meal without that because yeah you know cash is an ancient dumb thing.

Your username is[email protected]or your phone number. We only allow you a fixed 6 numbers password. Oh yeah we also block your account after three failed atempts. How convenient when the only thing you need to know is the name of someone and where they study. How convenient indeed.

Oh and also look we got pagesNOT TRANSLATED IN FRENCHBecause duh.

Jitterbit

While not the dumbest password rule, still dumb.

Password must have a length of at least eight characters and contain at least one: number, special char! # $% -_=, capital letter, and lowercase letter.

Maxpreps

Natalie Weiner: can’t sign in because her’s lastname is offensive language for the website

Merrill Lynch

Passwords must be between 8 and 20 characters, and some special characters are allowed. Users with randomly-generated passwords may find it particularly annoying to generate a password that works for their password safe.

Major League Baseball

When creating a new account they enforce some password rules like: length must be between 8 and 15 characters and there must be one upper case, one lower case letter and one number.

(MetLife)

Max length of 20 characters, no special characters allowed. Pasting into the second password field is disabled even with the Chrome extension Don’t Fuck With Paste.

Microsoft (work accounts)

What doesn’t seem to be a problem for personal accounts, is for work accounts from Microsoft (eg Office 365 etc.) .

Maximum 16 characters. So forget about using your new fancy diceware password here – or really any secure passwords in general.

Oh – and besides that, please don’t use any “exotic” symbols, like ¤ or €. Or the letters Æ, Ø or Å from the Danish alphabet. They all are supposedly “spaces”.

Mindware

You “may use special characters“, but only some of them – and we won’t necessarily tell you which ones.

MKB NetBankár

It only accepts lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numbers (any other character counts as forbidden character).

Also, if your password contains any invalid character, it will get marked as “Identical to the former 10 Passwords “.

To make it more fun, during the registration, it allows to set a 24 characters password to login to their website.

Once you try to login with the password, it will say that the maximum length accepted is 16 characters.

What actually happens, is that they let you insert 24 characters during registration, but only the first 16 will get actually used as password.

Movistar

Min 7 and max 8 characters for password! Also to be different than the username: the user name is automatically generated and is based on the surname of the user with some characters replaced by digits:)

Has been that way for more than 10 Years.

(Oracle)

Should notormust not? RFC 2119 may want a word with you.

Parnassus Investments

A site responsible for protecting your investments limiting you to a four character range with a bunch of other stupid rules? Shocking.

PayPal

We’ll tell you not to use your name as your password, but we won’t tell you how we restrict your password choice otherwise.

Paytm

Password must be between 5 and 15 characters. Also, spaces don’t count as characters.

PizzaHut

Passwords must be greater than 6 characters, and have an arbitrary set of rules we don’t tell you about until after you try to set your password.

Raiffeisen Bank Serbia

There are a couple of password limitations when creating a new account on Raiffeisen Bank Serbia on-line banking portal. Password length is limited to minimum 8 and maximum 16 characters. Also, minimum uppercase letters 1, minimum lowercase letter 1, minimum digits 2, maximum consecutive identical characters 4 and first character must be a letter. Oh … And, no special characters!

Red Hat

Symbols. You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

(Roll)

Your new password must be at least 4 characters long and no longer than 40 characters. Your password was not changed.

SAP Cloud Appliance Library

Passwords between 8 and 9 characters are the best.

(Safeway)

Passwords limited to 8 – 12 characters.

Singapore Airlines

/ d {6} /

Slovenska sporitelna

Slovenska sporitelna is the biggest bank in Slovakia. Despite pretty new version of the internet banking (rolled out in 2018), their password policy restricts password to be 16 characters long at most and prohibits any special characters.

Sparkasse

„Sparkasse“ is a group of banks which is pretty popular in Germany. It calls its passwords „PIN“ („persönliche Identifikations-Nummer“ – personal identification number), the rules are pretty horrific and its not even a number, even though it is called as such! Here is a screenshot from the branch where I am from (Jena, Germany), but since they have a central IT, I think it will be identical in other branches:

The rules are as such:

Only 5 characters
Small letters (a-z)
Large letters (A-Z)
Numbers (0-9)
„Special“ characters: ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü and ß (Not suprising for a german Company)

After the rules there some hints on how the password should not look like:

Combinations of your initials and the birthyear
Your phone number or parts thereof
Your zipcode
Commom combinations like (ab or)
Full or parts of your login credentials

Sprint

Sprint “upgraded” their security and disallow special characters.

State Bank of India (Foreign Travel Card)

State Bank of India is the largest government operated bank in India. They offer “travel” prepaid cards for foreign currencies, this is for their portal for the prepaid card users to manage their account.

Your password must:

Be between 8 and 9 characters long
Contain at least 1 lowercase character
Contain at least 1 uppercase character
Contain at least 1 special character
Contain at least 1 number
NOT contain any “hacking characters” – #,%, &,=, /,

Synchrony Financial

Financial services – where we don’t allow you to create the strongest password possible.

T-Mobile

We prefer to not tell you which characters you can use up front.

Telekom / T-Systems MyWorkplace

Telekom’s MyWorkplace is a Single Sign On / login hub for their Open Telekom Cloud which is basically an Amazon AWS clone. It’s rather new and especially for business customers. Especially because it is for business customers, there’s absolutely no reason to limit a password to 16 characters. Even special characters are limited to a certain set.

Ticketmaster.de

Your password length is limited between 8 and 32 characters.

(Trade Me)

Won’t allow spaces or single quotes. Maybe other characters as well – they do not say up front – but the password they accepted contained lots of other special characters.

TwinSpires

You can gamble on our site. We’ll keep your money secure with a 12 character password!

Ubisoft

Only tells you the rules after submitting and clicking a link to a pop up window.

United States Postal Service

Pick from an arbitrary list of symbols, and no repeating characters.

University of California San Diego

Passwords must be between 8 and11characters long!

University of Texas at Austin

Because of the last two rules, which ban dictionary words and any variants using symbol substitutions,neitherof the passwords presented in thexkcd comicare allowed.

University of Windsor

The password policy applies to alumni as well. Must be at least 10 characters long, with at least 1 upper case and 1 lower case character, at least 1 number, at least 1 special character. Password expires every 120 days, and you can ‘t reuse an old one.

Vancity Credit Union

Personal Access Code (or PAC – they are too ashamed to call it a password), must be between 5 to 8 digits and cannot start with ‘0’. (no letters or symbols)

Very.co.uk

Password field allows (only) the listed Special Characters ($.,!% ^*). You’re also forced to use both upper, and lower letters, as well as a number.

(Vio Bank)

The password requirement is not even fully enumerated. Upon inspection of the source code, the following lines were found, hidden by javascript: “Must include at least% MINSPECIAL of the following characters: -. ~! @ # & _ {} |: $% ^ * ()=[];? / “

The actual list of special characters that are prohibited is correctly enumerated there. It’s a result ofa misapplicationof thevariable allowedSpecialCharacters found here.

It took under 5 minutes to find the bug after looking at the source for the first time. This is a bank.