Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

That moment when you test an old, but still highly valued and securely used, password that you think isn't super obscure but not likely to be used much and see a 4000+ count...


And that's exactly why using this entire corpus - or even more than the first few tens of thousands - as a blacklist would be an extremely user-hostile choice [1].

Password psychology is remarkably consistent across a given demographic, because most people start by modifying of one or more base tokens that are already stored in memory because of their personal significance.

So unless the implementation gives specific, real-time UX feedback to teach users how to pick a password that is very unlikely to be in this (and future, ever-growing) versions of this corpus, using a large blacklist is "gotcha infosec". It creates UX where the user cannot possibly come up with a "good" password using most of their previous strategies. It's the worst kind of "gotcha infosec".

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434266


That moment when you test a very unique password you used to use and it's been pwned once.. GULP! Glad I stopped using that one


Same experience here, except mine was current until shortly after I checked it.

The weird part is that I only used it on internal systems at work. With an overly paranoid security department. Either they’re paranoid in the wrong ways, or I have an evil twin somewhere.

At least, I hope they’re the evil twin...


time for some soul-searching




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: