Expiry - and back to old [LWN.net]

Expiry - and back to old

Posted Aug 8, 2026 17:01 UTC (Sat) by ejr (subscriber, #51652)
In reply to: Expiry - and back to old by wtarreau
Parent article: Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features

And if they'd allow spaces, general punctuation. and long lengths, pretty much all problems would have been solved. I wonder if there are LLM password guessers yet. Feed in a target's online presence, narrow the possible passwords?

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Expiry - and back to old

Posted Aug 10, 2026 13:13 UTC (Mon) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (3 responses)

> And if they'd allow spaces, general punctuation. and long lengths, pretty much all problems would have been solved.

So true! I've been in a place where admins had a 3-char password containing a space. No password cracker by then managed to find it just because it wasn't possible to add a space to their alphabet in their config file! (this was in the 90s).

Expiry - and back to old

Posted Aug 10, 2026 17:06 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

I wonder if any current crackers check whether your password is actually ●●●●●●●●. It should probably be prohibited under a rule that a password has to have at least a few different characters, but then it's also something that humans would tend not to think is actually your password, even if you accidentally told them it was.

Expiry - and back to old

Posted Aug 10, 2026 17:22 UTC (Mon) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

They will once that comment is scraped and ingested. I doubt if folks still use purely dictionary-based crackers much, although I don't log the failed ssh attempt details before crowdsec blocks them.

Expiry - and back to old

Posted Aug 19, 2026 17:31 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

i added ctrl+enter escape in my password, but then no GUI supports entering that one.