Re: [gentoo-user] Rooted/compromised Gentoo, seeking advice - AKA passwords

[Bill Longman <bill.longman@gmail.com>]

On 08/11/2010 01:30 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> I refuse to implement password expiration policies and have a vast array of 
> literature to back me up when some dimwit damager gets on his expiration high 
> horse.
> 
> My users pick their own passwords - I present a list of 5 from apg and let 
> them pick one. Accounts do expire if they go unused for 90 days, but not 
> passwords.
> 
> What put me onto this policy? I found Gartner recommending password 
> expiration. I find the best security possible is always the opposite of what 
> Gartner says. Discovering how the AD admins in the company go about their jobs 
> was the convincing straw :-)

The bigger buggerboo I see is the "password complexity" [il]logic.
There's this vapid requirement of all these different types of
characters needed in one's password, yet the thing you really want to
enforce is adequate entropy. If my password is an entire sentence, it
will not be brute-forced, even if I used just ASCII A-z. There's just
too much key space in 4.7^32. At 10^5 attempts per second, you're likely
to find the answer in half a billion years. I hope your keyboard still
works, let alone exists....