Re: Whitespace in passwords

From: Bruce K. Marshall (bkmlstsgohere_at_comcast.net)
Date: 09/06/05

  • Next message: Anders Thulin: "RE: Whitespace in passwords" 
    To: "bryan allott" <homegrown@bryanallott.net>
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 15:00:54 -0500

    Bryan,

    I don't believe there is any reason that people are discouraged from using
    the space character other than application programming restrictions. If the
    space character was a field delimeter or otherwise broke the coded password
    processing function the programmers wouldn't allow it in a password.

    I don't see this restriction very often these days. But we do have
    Microsoft treating the space character differently than any other. They
    don't classify it as lowercase, uppercase, number, or symbol when checking
    the password against complexity requirements. I consider it a symbol, and
    it falls within the top 10 most popular symbols when analyzing password
    choices. But even then it is not a popular character.

    Making complete use of all available characters is important for increasing
    the difficulty of password cracking. It isn't enough to just make the space
    character available and then only encourage people to use letters and
    numbers. 

    ----
Bruce K. Marshall - bkmarshall@passwordresearch.com
Password Research Institute - http://www.passwordresearch.com
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "bryan allott" <homegrown@bryanallott.net>
To: <pen-test@securityfocus.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 4:19 AM
Subject: Whitespace in passwords
> generally, and i dont know if this is social conditioning due to the 
> misnomer "passWORD" rather than passPHRASE but it seems that [most?] 
> people choose passes that dont contain whitespaces, and in fact, there are 
> some system implementations that wont allow whitespaces in the password.
> my main question, re security, is wether the whitespace made the password 
> too vulnerable? [historically] and why this constraint is introduced in 
> many systems.. [but then, if myth- why propogate it?]
> i'm thinking that whitespaces [if yr system can handle them, and why not?] 
> would add another measure of complexity in cracking pwds?
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