It is indeed very silly to put such artificial constraints on passwords. As a matter of fact any constraint on the composition of passwords will dramatically reduce the keyspace and is therefore a bad idea.

On the other hand you cannot entrust users to choose their own passwords or you get names of pets, birthdates and abc123 all over the place.

Only fully random passwords offer any real level of security but nobody will be able to remember them and then start writing them on scraps of paper which are "hidden" under the keyboard.

I did have some success with the Crypt::GeneratePassword module which generates "pronounceable" random passwords. The keyspace is of course not as large as a truly random password generator but for all but the most critical application it seems OK.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

In reply to Re: Demonstrate Weakness of "Standard Format" Passwords by CountZero
in thread Demonstrate Weakness of "Standard Format" Passwords by Limbic~Region

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.