Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have found that a significant number of popular websites still have weak password creation policies. The study, which evaluated over 20,000 websites, discovered that 75% of the sites allow passwords to be shorter than the recommended 8 characters, with 12% even permitting single-character passwords. Additionally, 40% of the sites limit password lengths below the recommended 64 characters, and 72% allow the use of dictionary words as passwords. The study also found that 88% of the websites allow users to choose known breached passwords, and a third of the websites don’t support special characters in chosen passwords.
The researchers also noted that most websites (42.1%) still adhere to NIST’s 2004 password policy guidelines, even though they have been updated in 2017. Furthermore, a notable portion of websites (16.7%) are still sticking to NIST’s recommendations from 1985. The researchers suggest that insecure password policy decisions are closely aligned with the default configurations of popular web software, and if popular web software implemented recommended password policy configurations by default, many websites could adopt stronger password policies. They also emphasize that education and outreach efforts could help website creators become more aware of modern password creation policy options.
In addition to password creation policies, the researchers also evaluated website login policies on a substantial number of websites. They found that nearly 2,000 domains serve login pages only over HTTP, meaning that they transmit and store passwords in plain text. Furthermore, hundreds of websites deploy typo-tolerant password authentication, which can be abused during attacks relying on password guessing, credential stuffing, and tweaking attacks. Almost 6,000 websites return login error messages that make user enumeration attacks easy, and 570 websites send plaintext passwords in emails, potentially violating the EU’s GDPR Article 32. The researchers suggest that GDPR could be used to penalize insecure practices and incentivize remediation of insecure website behaviors. They also believe that outreach campaigns and changes in popular web frameworks may help fix several login security issues.
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