Min Password Length vs Block Common Passwords

[mpalmer (Matt Palmer)]

My bet there is that the client-side validation is counting octets, whereas the server, being Unicode-aware, is counting characters, and coming up with a different result.

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

Characters in that codeblock (and indeed all of U+1xxxx) are four-octets long in UTF-8. I don’t know what it’s counting, but Unicode 7/Unicode 8 issues (like amphora) could be in play.

[david (David Taylor)]

Taking the string " " as an example, javascript says

"😀".length = 2

and Ruby says

"😀".length = 1

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Which is the correct implementation here? @codinghorror's blog post says:

Enforce a minimum Unicode password length

because it’s nice and simple for users. So is one character. That sounds reasonable to me.

However… the blog also says

If you paste the above four Unicode emojis into your favorite login dialog (go ahead – try it), to discover that it … isn’t in fact four characters.

This is indeed true of the Discourse password fields - one emoji = 2 characters. So if it’s showing as 2 characters in the password field, surely that should count as 2 characters in a password

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On a related note, it is currently very difficult to type emojis directly into html password inputs - you can only copy/paste them in. This is the case on Chrome on mac (using system emoji window), and also Safari on iOS (the emoji button doesn’t even show up with the password field focused). So, as much as I try, I can’t use as my password on Discourse (without cheating with copy/paste).

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

😀 is four octets in UTF-8: Base64 visualizer

I have no idea why Javascript gets that count. (UTF-16?) But 😀 does show as ⏺⏺ in the password field of Discourse (for me).

[david (David Taylor)]

@elijah

UTF-16?

It would appear so (from here)

This property returns the number of code units in the string. UTF-16, the string format used by JavaScript, uses a single 16-bit code unit to represent the most common characters, but needs to use two code units for less commonly-used characters, so it’s possible for the value returned by length to not match the actual number of characters in the string.

[fedup]

A sentence with spaces - could be the best personal password choice

[Mittineague]

I’m not sure a space would work. It’s a control character and there might be some filters somewhere that wouldn’t like it.

[david (David Taylor)]

@Mittineague

I’m not sure a space would work

A space is absolutely fine, it’s just another character as far as a password is concerned. Try it here on meta - it works.

[Alt-Elijah (Elijah's Alternate)]

@Alt-Elijah

Ho notato che la casella per la modifica della password mi mostra un segno verde “ok” dopo aver inserito otto caratteri del blocco “Simboli e pittogrammi vari”, ad esempio e quelli vicini, ma dopo aver inviato, cambia in rosso “troppo breve”. Devo arrivare a dieci caratteri completi, anche se tutti sono non-ASCII. Dopo la modifica della password, sono riuscito ad accedere sia con FF che con Chromium.

Rifacendo i test, ora che so che il mio gestore di password è sicuro. La stessa cosa si verifica di nuovo: un numero sufficiente di emoji per ottenere un segno verde “ok” non è sufficiente per funzionare realmente. E mentre provavo password sempre più lunghe, in modo iterativo, sono stato disconnesso, credo al terzo tentativo. Quando sono riuscito finalmente a impostarla, con una password di emoji, ho comunque visto lampeggiare il messaggio “sei stato disconnesso”, ma in realtà non sono stato disconnesso.

Non sono sicuro che questa disconnessione sia un bug specifico delle emoji o una sorta di funzione fuorviante (o almeno inutile). Se è una funzione, si prega di far sì che la casella “sei stato disconnesso” spieghi il motivo.

[riking (Kane York)]

Sì, questo è dovuto all’eredità di JavaScript, che porta a un conteggio errato della lunghezza delle stringhe contenenti emoji (e altri caratteri del Piano Astrale). Il server conta la lunghezza correttamente.