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Maybe the restrictions on special characters is because they do password processing by some sort of regex processing. (Obligatory xkcd: xkcd: Bobby Tables[^])
I 'sort of' (but only sort of) can accept that they for simplicity restrict passwords to 8 bit characters. Unless they do full UTF-8/16 processing, some UTF byte values of e.g. an emoji may interfere with their regex processing; an intermediate UTF-8 byte may, in isolation, look like one of their special characters. Also: We still have a lot of text based internet protocols, developed before the internet community realized that there is a world outside 7-bit ASCII. If you connect through a protocol that is not updated, and not protected by some encoding of binaries, some of your emoji byte values in UTF coding may be misinterpreted as a protocol control character.
Yet, anno 2023 (and really even anno 2000 or 1990!) I would take for granted that both text oriented protocols and web sites can handle any ISO 8859 variant, 8-bit characters, or the numerous IBM code pages for the 128-255 range, without misbehaving or breaking down.
What scares me most is the limitation to 20 chars, clearly suggesting that they do not hash it but store it as plaintext. If hashed, there would be no reason for limiting the length. And ... there is no reason why they should store the password as plaintext. They should not!
If they do not store it as plaintext, and if they accept any ISO 8859 8-bit character, I do not have any difficulties creating 20-character passwords that would not appear in any dictionary attack. Attacking a 160 bit key by brute force is something that the attacker will do only if she expects to find something really valuable behind the locked door. (Besides: What happened to the old technique of incurring an exponentially increasing delay for each unsuccessful attempt to log in to an account? That prevents all brute force attacks!)
The restriction on repeating sequences I take as their attempt to discipline their users to create better passwords. They should include 'qwerty' and 'asdf' in the list as well. And several others. Even though this is an 'arbitrary' restriction, there are so many users out there ignorant with passwords that I accept it as a way to give those ignorant users a kick in the behind. 
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All great points and I agree with you.
trønderen wrote: Maybe the restrictions on special characters is because they do password processing by some sort of regex processing.
Yes, that is my guess at why they limit it to 20. I'm guessing that their algorithm would get stuck or they would possibly incur some regex backtracking[^] and they would hit some limitation which would cause their pattern matching to blow up.
That's all I can think because surely they aren't saving cleartext password. 
Like you said, they're trying to give the user a good kick in the seat of the pants and insure they aren't using a bad password so they're looking at what the password contains, but it just seems bad.
I mean they could just
1. hash the cleartext
2. look up the hash in a known bad passwords table
If the hash isn't in the known bads then save it as the user's hash (which can be matched later).
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[edit]
I missed your point at first. That is a deep approach that will likely frustrate any user that is not using password generation.
[Hash leakage hardening]
That is why you add a little “salt” that is different for each user. Prevents rainbow table lookup attacks if the hashes are exposed.
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trønderen wrote: What scares me most is the limitation to 20 chars, clearly suggesting that they do not hash it but store it as plaintext
There are other possible explanations.
1. They simply do not know how normal hashing works.
2. They just needed/wanted a length on that field for other reasons so they chose an arbitrary value.
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jschell wrote: 1. They simply do not know how normal hashing works.
I wouldn't be surprised! 
jschell wrote: 2. They just needed/wanted a length on that field
Or maybe they didn't know how to create an input field of arbitrary length. They created a fixed input field of 20 chars and don't know how to expand it.
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You need to limit "all" fields, then check for "nonsense" sequence of repeating blanks, etc.
People fall asleep leaning on the keyboard.
And the last thing you want is a report with a "blank field" that runs for pages ... and you wonder "how did it ..."
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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What bugs me just as much: In an input field for phone number or bank account / credit card number, and they accept digits only. There is a convention for writing credit card numbers as 1234 2345 3456 4567 - not as 1234234534564567, which makes it a lot harder to detect a typo. Bank account numbers are written as 1234 56 7890, or sometimes as 1234.56.7890. Again: 1234567890 makes it much harder to verify. Phone numbers are 404 55 606, not 40455606 (and today, you see phone numbers up to 14 digits, even domestic ones, making it even harder to detect a typo).
If they really insist on handling a structured number as a singe long integer, those 'readability spaces' can be removed by a single program code line, in several commonly used text processing tools/libraries. It takes a lot more effort to display an error message box declaring 'Spaces are not permitted in phone numbers' (or whatever).
While the number of sites rejecting 'readability spaces' seems to be declining, I have seen an increase in another 'facility' that I wouldn't say 'bugs' me, it rather amuses me: Entry fields for phone or account numbers with a spin button. As when I typed the wrong account or phone number, and really would like to spin from the mistyped number to the correct one. This started long before the AI wave, so don't blame AI!
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When I've had to validate "contact" information, we (simply) used "national address" databases (world wide subscription) in real time to validate all contact information. We did what USPS, UPS and FedEx said to do in their specs. Incremental searching while you typed; you didn't even have to complete your own address information, since it "had" to be in the "database".
A call center app for all of New Zealand, 1,000,000+ addresses, with realtime incremental searching. (Different DB; custom API)
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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trønderen wrote: What bugs me just as much: In an input field for phone number or bank account / credit card number, and they accept digits only
I found a product that I really wanted. The order form would not accept 16 digits. Too long it said.
So I copied the page locally, hacked it, then submitted my order. Far as I can recall I got it.
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🍺🍺🍺
The seller really didn't deserve make the sale, though.
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Limiting to 20 helps prevent injection attacks. Every input field on the web should have a max length.
The length should be checked first before any other validation.
Especially a field like password where they try to allow some special characters.
Give a hacker an unlimited length on fields that live in front of the “authenticated border” and they will find an encoding to bypass your checks. AI will probably help here with generating thousands of new attack patterns.
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Phew, I am in:
Pa$$w0rd
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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I interpret the big red X in your screen capture to mean that those are the only allowed characters!
“No special characters except this list”
We use the “allow list” special characters for one of our systems. Keeps it simple security wise.
“Deny lists” never stand the test of time.
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englebart said: I interpret the big red X in your screen capture to mean that those are the only allowed characters!
But if you read the text after the red x it says “any characters except the following” and I had tried one of the ones from the list and it rejected my password.
englebart: Deny lists” never stand the test of time.
Agree 
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So they should put a green check with wording like
Any of these can be used: < > …
Awful language. Not your problem!
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Doesn't the BIG RED 'X' in front of "Quote: Special characters except for # & * < > ( ) ' [ ]
mean that you can use THOSE special characters, but none other?
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That's interesting, because someone else thought that also.
But, notice that the message next to it says, "Special characters except for # & * < > ( ) ' [ ]
Also, I had tried to use one of the ones listed which is how I got the warning.
So, they obviously have a confusing message along with the other problems they have.
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The closer you look, the worse it gets!
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Harrison Pratt wrote: The closer you look, the worse it gets!
Your statement cracked me up! 
Indeed it does.
It's why most people choose to not look at things very closely.
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raddevus wrote: when parsing the password string
There's the problem.
If a site can't state the policy in a single non-run-on sentence I would avoid it. Extravagant parsing or using regular expressions to validate a user's password seems over-engineered.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: Extravagant parsing or using regular expressions to validate a user's password seems over-engineered.
Agree 100%!
I don't understand why they don't just:
1. hash your plaintext password.
2. compare it to known bad password hashes
3. if it matches any of the known bad, then reject, otherwise store your hash and be done
Why they looking at my password so closely, anyway? 
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The fact that this is still being used today is amazing.
I grew up close to Cleveland, Ohio and living in various other states
like Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon and now Arizona machines of this size we seldom seen
not that I was looking for them.
Please enjoy the story. Comment about BIG industry near you curious what is in other parts of the world.
The Air Force's 50,000 Ton Press - PlaneHistoria[^]
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I'm not reading it. The GDPR banner for that site is one of those "you have to disable each vender individually - here is a huge list, have fun." ones and life is too short to spend 10 minutes clicking on "No, I don't want you get my info to do with as you will" checkboxes.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I am not sure I understand the link did not try to steal any information when I used it
I will try to delete the post.
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Good luck with deleting ...
On that note, after getting the message "Anonymous posting is not allowed" I'm thinking that I was not who I was when I signed in to comment on this ... news 
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