It’s 2023, why are websites actively preventing pasting into fields like passwords and credit card number boxes? I use a password manager for security, it’s recommended by my employer to use one, and it even avoids human error like accidentally fat-fingering keys, and best of all with the credit card number I don’t have to memorize anything or know a single digit/character!
I have to use the Don’t Fuck With Paste addon just to be able to paste my secrets into certain monthly billing websites; why is my electric provider and one of my banks so asinine that pasting cannot be allowed? I can only imagine downsides and zero upsides to this toxic dark-pattern behavior.
There is even a mention about this in NIST SP 800-63B, a standard for identity management that some companies must follow in the USA, which mentions forcefully rotating passwords and denying “password paste-in” as antiquated/bad advice:
Verifiers SHOULD permit claimants to use “paste” functionality when entering a memorized secret. This facilitates the use of password managers, which are widely used and in many cases increase the likelihood that users will choose stronger memorized secrets
Edit: I discovered that for Firefox users there’s a simpler way than exposing your secrets to someone’s third-party addon. Simply open about:config, search for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, and change it from true to false.
Edit 2: As some have pointed out, that config value interferes with regular functionality on some sites. Probably best to leave it alone unless you know what you’re doing.
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Agree. It is a stupid and antiquated idea. Two things I’d like to say though:
One: you can probably set up some form of auto-type from your password manager to get around this issue.
Two: blocking pasting is probably because password managers and operating systems must be secure when it comes to the clipboard, and clipboard management. Because if that’s not safe, your passwords you are copying and pasting are not safe.
Two: blocking pasting is probably because password managers and operating systems must be secure when it comes to the clipboard, and clipboard management. Because if that’s not safe, your passwords you are copying and pasting are not safe.
Yes, but it’s not their clipboard, it’s not their browser, it’s not their operating system, why are they breaking basic functionality when my password isn’t their responsibility until I have entered it into their field and sent it to them?
This is the nannying bullshit I can’t stand. They made their shit more difficult to use, not to protect our private information on their servers or saved in their software, but solely because they’re concerned about how I’m using the clipboard on my own device.
these days password managers clear the clipboard, still the clipboard is not secure which would be why some still block it.
really its an indication we need to drop User/Pass auth once and for all.
Which has always been an asinine point of view. By the time a site has blocked the paste the password is already in the clipboard. No security has been added in that regard, only frustration.
really its an indication we need to drop User/Pass auth once and for all.
What’s a suitable replacement here?
Webauthn looks cool
I use it where it’s available, with a couple of Yubikey 5s. It’s the best solution I’ve come across.
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Google, Apple, and Microsoft are working on Passkeys. I don’t know the security behind it, but so far it’s been great for the few sites that support it.
“Passkeys” is just a marketing term for Webauthn.
The system mentioned by Established here is called VRF, there is also technology called Self-Sovereign Identity aka DiD (a w3c standard)
To keep it simple, essentially we are moving to authenticators using systems that are similar to how a website identifies itself and secures your connection. For the user it will still be mostly the same, unlock device, unlock data (which I bet in some cases will STILL be password during the transition) do your thing. As time goes on and things like identity keys that we carry with us become a thing (think like a fancy version of the electronic door cards).
In general it will be much easier and less an issue to get into most systems and all of your accounts become more secure as we move away from having any data on the provider that could be used to reconstruct your password. Ofc all of this is still a bit away from being fully realized, expect rollouts to become more serious by the end of the decade.
Wouldn’t that not be great for privacy?
this is not dissimilar to how high security setups work for organizations now, really what this is is a scaling up of the kind of things IT administrators are already doing when locking down production among other systems (its a very common login pattern for Linux based systems for thier SSH terminals).
The big difference here is that your password changes from a password to a digital signature bound to time, hardware and the user. If the user so chooses they can always put a many levels on top of that that they want, be it passwords, additional keys, biometrics, what-have-you.
Since your credentials never leave your device data breeches do not compromise your account or access to it (only the data the provider failed to protect). This also enables even higher levels of security through the whole credential chain, want to end-to-end-encrypt your data and encode it with your own cipher while storing it in the providers database? This is not only possible it will end up changing how we develop some applications. As a developer I just want to give you the utility, if I can ensure strong encryption that I NEVER have access to, its a whole boat of liability I don’t even have to worry about.
In short we are taking the mechanics of auth and making it entirely cryptographic with keys without any worry about compromising a simple text input box. The possible combinations of certificate data and system parameters alone increases the difficulty of a breech through login significantly.
It will not stop everything of course, and the usual risks around a bad release, a failed audit and an admin bypassing things knowing or unknowingly are all still problems.
The other thing this enables, should it get that far, decentralized replacement of Google/MS/Amazon auth systems many of us MUST gate our sites with, youll be able to accept logins from multiple systems without ever having to write any new code. As the standard becomes adopted and supported firing up a site with all the usual traditional logins combined with the more-modern cert-style setup will no longer be a game of dealing with app setups and IAM, you can just load and go.
Example of difference here: I could paste my public key to my prod systems here on lemmy and it would not change a thing about access to my systems, no one with the key or any of my signatures could do anything. With certificate based auth we know both sides of the transaction as well so MITM is not a thing in most scenarios.
Thank you for the detailed reply. I just had other things in mind. For important things, sure, but I kind of appreciate the ability to give some website a username, password, and maybe an email and that’s all the ask.
I know IPs and browser fingerprinting kind of make this moot anyway.
you won’t even give them that in this kind of system. you will get a user hash that is based of your signature, the system your using’s key and some mux of time and entropy input. This hash will be how they track you in a database and as systems evolve could even be a way to communicate with the user directly (like email) without knowing or holding any PII/NPI
Anything you assign to them would be data they have (maybe a common display name). Anything truly important that needs to be up there can be encrypted with different techniques that would allow the provider to work with your data without ever having to access or decrypt your data.
so the idea of them “needing to have something” to function is true, but fundamentally, they don’t need as much to operate in this system and its possible to have standards that enforce security on your more sensitive details that are sent. Imagine the security of your data, on thier system, still being ruled by your security. Even if hackers get in and copy the entire database its effectively useless.
Passkeys
some sites like Walmart are removing the password requirement completly in favor of OTP, mcdonalds does the same, you type your email/phone number it sends you a link and you click the link to gain access. I wouldn’t recommend that for a bank site but, a low risk site? why not.
I find that setup an obnoxious user experience. Instead of one hotkey that tells my password manager to fill out the login form, now I have to switch to my mail app, wait for the login email to arrive (if my mail provider or the site’s mail provider is having trouble, no login for me!) then back to my browser where I need to close the original tab because clicking the email link opened a new one.
If I am on a shared computer, now I need to either manually copy a long URL from my phone or read my email on that computer, a much bigger security risk than just entering a password and 2FA code.
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Passkeys. Google already supports them. Freaking amazingly easy.
Passkeys 4 lyfe.
You can just as easily have keylogger running in backround as clipboard sniffer.
Browsers don’t have permission to read clipboard, just change them (unless you specifically give them permission to read it).
As you can see no benefits not using PM. It’s in fact safer, because if databade with non-hashed passwords leaks, your password doesn’t because it’s different for every service.
This is one of the dumbest shit ngl. My bank also does this. However they go one step further. They force a maximum 12 letter password and 1 character of each type (capital, small, number, symbol) is necessary. This actively reduces password security smh
Mine truncated the first 8 characters, when I discovered that I sent them a request to their cyber security department and they told me.of was by design.
I closed my account over that bs
It’s because they likely have an ancient backend that can’t fit it in the database field…
a legitimate reason to close the account and back away slowly
Wtf lmao. How to I check if mine does it💀
Type the first 8 chars and see if you can still log in?
Good idea, although this wouldn’t tell you if they truncated the password at 9 characters instead (or 10 or 11 characters etc).
So you would have to try different attempts without making too many in one sitting that gets you locked out.
If you tried your password without the last character, then I think that would tell you if ANY truncation is being used (but it won’t tell you whether it happened at the 8th, 9th, 10th etc character). But that seems like the best thing to try first just to rule it out.
I checked network logs. Apparently my bank encrypts both uid and password before sending. I put 8 chars and it gave error so I’m assuming no
that’s exactly how I figured it out. then asked for some friends and family with account in the same bank to validate
My bank also does this shit. It’s aggravating to use their website when every step along the way they put the burden of security on the user.
Pasting is disabled on almost every text field, even for things like account numbers (which they make you type in twice) when you want to do a transfer. The only way to log in is to manually type in your username, password, and a damn captcha everytime. The 6 digit 2FA code is the icing on the cake. If you idle for a minute or two, they log you out and force you to go through the whole thing again.
Banks make the worst possible UI and justify it by saying “security” xD
Because people would write down their passwords? I wonder how many people use their browser’s built in password manager
That’s one way it is weaker, but moreso because it reduces the entropy. If a user can provide a password which uses 26 letters, upper and lowercase, 10 numbers, and an unrestricted set of symbols, but for the sake of argument we’ll say 10, then there are a lot of possible combinations. If you are limited to only 12 possible at max, it is 46^12. Now you impose an artificial requirement that it is one of each, then it actually weakens that further by making the hacker know that there is one of each in there so it is 2626101046^8. Or roughly 910^19 vs. 1.3610^18. I personally try to use passwords which are between 16-20 characters long, or roughly 2*10^33. By restricting the total number of characters and forcing specific combinations, then the password is less cryptographically sound.
Using this calculator, https://bitwarden.com/password-strength/, it is a difference of 3 hours vs. centuries using the bank’s mandate vs. only lowercase and 20 characters.
Edit: Something seemed off about the math. Should have multiplied instead of added, but still less sound secure because there are imposed requirements. The biggest issue is that there is an upper limit of 12 characters.
The 20 character requirement is kind of a huge component though.
Sure. Banks should be enforcing that instead of special characters. But the vast majority of people would just choose “football” or “password” as their passwords if they weren’t required to do something more complex.
I disagree with the argument that it’s less secure to require symbols in passwords as a blanket statement . It’s less secure to require symbols in passwords than if you are also enforcing much longer minimum passwords as well.
Sure. Banks should be enforcing that instead of special characters. But the vast majority of people would just choose “football” or “password” as their passwords if they weren’t required to do something more complex.
Ironically though, something like
IveLovedUsingFootballAsMyPassword!EverSinceThe1980s.
as a password would be miles ahead of even the most random character combination possible, but which is only 12-20 characters long.
And as an added bonus, the above example is practically guaranteed to have never been used before, in addition to being correct horse battery staple (that is, tremendously easy to remember).
I hate when a website/app in this day and age imposes an absurdly low upper password character limit like 30. (cough looking at you, PayPal, when I re-set my password a few years ago it was freaking 20, not exaggerating).
Shouldn’t password length below like 100 (or realistically, any length until it starts crashing the js behind it?) not matter anyways, since it’s all salted, peppered and hashed before further processing anyways?
There is no technical reason for there to be a maximum length on the user’s password.
Watch:
Here’s a password bitwarden generated for me:
Bonded-Reforest-Prenatal7-Spoken-Straggler-Catcall
Here’s the base64-encoded SHA3-512 hash for that password:
Q2WaVLdTAg5T4xi3VB5PMI7GkAv3np9Usa2+uTMglbMcDDAdYXzUNgAzzYLoSWku/e007vkKfvSotzoriSKt4Q==Here’s the has for the password
password:6adUhnNqVQr0/qhh4jeDBcSlVaBQlN7h3KL2iv6knMOlDo3m6hMepSExH01vsFShRugoL441/y5jaMGmLpCXFg==Notice how the thing the website should be storing in their database is exactly the same length, regardless of the input?
For extra fun, here’s the hash for your sample password:
GbxnrQ31PInMSu2ik2ZR5TefgXIInSJBxZ5zwcYmkRxzw07tZoxPqJbEmcbuTBpzCZzwLrqqcxz04p8ToGszRQ==Here’s a tool to generate your own hashes: https://www.liavaag.org/English/SHA-Generator/
I mean, if we’re being pedantic, there’s a reasonable technical limit once the password reaches multiple MBs of data.
But yes, there’s no good reason for the actual limits we’re seeing out in the wild.
I mean, if we’re being pedantic, there’s a reasonable technical limit once the password reaches multiple MBs of data.
But yes, there’s no good reason for the actual limits we’re seeing out in the wild.
Yes @evatronic, this is of course what I meant with “except if the js starts crashing maybe”. I’m aware that hashes end up with the same length, no worries 😄
Yeah, I agree they should be requiring much longer minimum password lengths (and show users how to use passphrases). Max password lengths are also absurd.
Clipboards (the buffer where copypasta is stored) are a weak link in security because ANY app can expect access to it. If there is malware on your system it generally has access to the clipboard buffer, and therefore any credentials you might paste.
“OK, but usually you only paste the password and type the username?”
Quite true. Keyloggers are also a thing and easy to install on desktop OS, maybe harder on mobile.OS.since (at least on android) you need to grant permissions for keyboard apps. Either way if a keylogger is installed then you’re fucked.
It boils down to a bad risk assessment. Those services decided memorized credentials must be manually typed to prevent clipboard snooping at the (likely) cost of reduced password entropy and/or weak MFA (e.g., SMS or email based TOTP). In other words: stupid CISOs.
The problem is, by the time you’ve figured out that you can’t paste your password you’ve already copied it …
That’s a really good point
can you prevent someone from copying it in the first place?
uh if you’ve got a keylogger on your system, clipboard access is not that far away
I just edit the HTML and paste the text in as the value. Sites that do that are jabronis
Hey man I want to thank you for sending me into a time vortex back to the 90s. I forgot about that word.
I love that word! It’s the Bomb-Diggity!
😊. No worries. It came back into my lexicon thanks to its always sunny in Philadelphia 😆.
A niche YouTuber I watch managed to turn a maintenance request from an old job into an even more niche meme. It contained the text:
“Some uncouth jabroni made a righteous mess in the lavatory and it stinks something fierce”
Just adding that financial institutions are very hesitant to adopt new technology, and therefore tend to abide by what tech enthusiasts would consider antiquated best practices.
Source: Software engineer in Fintech
Yup, that behavior is notorious with financial institutions. Using old and archaic programming languages and systems that they are too afraid to touch because they don’t know how to rebuild it if it crashes. What I do is use passphrases for cases like that, so I can easily type them myself as a last resort. I just check my password manager quickly and then manually enter the password.
Whats that? I cant hear you.
Can you say it again, but in COBOL?
Only, last month Treasury Diirect finally removed the virtual keyboard as the only means of password entry 🙃
I don’t believe their passwords are case sensitive yet.
Sure, but the NIST documents referenced in the post are admissible in court. With some creative thinking you can probably help a criminal break your weak password and then put the liability on them because if their webform was correct yoy would have pasted a strong password from your manager.
Can confirm. Source: cyber security analyst in fintech
Well, because it works “well enough” right now. Changing it is a monumental effort because they’re such slow ass big stupid companies anymore.
And when they fuck it up, and they will, no one wants to be the reason for it so it never happens
Edit: I discovered that for Firefox users there’s a simpler way than exposing your secrets to someone’s third-party addon. Simply open
about:config, search fordom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, and change it from true to falseNote that this disables all DOM/JavaScript clipboard events, so sites that need custom clipboard handling (like Google Docs) won’t work properly if you try to copy and paste.
What you can instead do is:
- Right-click the password field
- Click on the “console” tab in the browser dev tools
- Type
$0.value = 'password'and press enter, with the correct password of course.
But then you’ll have to display your password in plaintext (could be a problem around other people) and leave a trace in the console.
That’s true. You could instead try to unattach the paste event handler, but that’s more effort and isn’t a one-liner. There’s probably a browser extension for it.
I usually don’t have other people behind me when using my computer, but most of my passwords are 30+ characters and randomly generated, so I’m not too worried about someone seeing it for the short period it takes me to paste it into the console the run
clear()to clear the console.
Same reason some websites still have max password lengths of 12 characters: Bad programmers that don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to the most basic of security concepts.
Bullshit requirements like that come from product managers.
Programmers would rather be lazy and not have to implement a limit anyway
It goes both ways: Programmers have a responsibility to inform PMs how bad of an idea short max password lengths are. And if they’re still absolutely forced to implement it anyway, do you really want to be working somewhere that goes out of their way to purposefully implement poor security and somewhere that doesn’t respect serious concerns raised from their engineers?
This one always surprises me. Who the fuck is not hashing passwords? What else is wrong with this site if such basic concepts are ignored?
or sometime they do hash the password but they are just ignorant of how it works so they keep the limit regardless
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If you use a proper password hash function, and some joker submits a million-character password, you’ve got a denial-of-service attack.
The limit doesn’t have to be 12 characters, but there does need to be a limit.
Why would that be a DOS? The hash of something is always the same length. Might only take a bit more time to compute, but a million characters isn’t that much with modern hardware. If anything, the risk of collisions would be higher.
Hashing is typically done server-side. So you need to transmit the password to the server and you can’t have a truly unlimited data limit. Pretty much every web server will reject requests over some size so while it’s entirely reasonable to support something like a 1,000 char password if you really wanted to, having it be truly unlimited with something using a 10 million character password is a security/operational risk in itself.
Highly recommend this extension ::Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy:: available for both FireFox and Chrome
Wow, thank you for that, while we’re at it, can we stop websites from fucking with the back history button ? Thanks !!
That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better
Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds
Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”
I’m specifically thinking of AliExpress, which erases your history when going from item page to buy page. They’re otherwise just regular pages
Github is doing this now and it’s so annoying.
As always, Firefox steps up against stupid website behavior.
I have a hotkey that types my clipboard instead of pasting it. Just for this problem.
I have used AHK for this, and it works beautifully.
Care to share the setup/script for this?
So the best thing to do is to not store your password in plain text, and there are many discussions on the best way to do that on the AHK forums, so I won’t go into it,
But I will say the way I have found that is best for separation of passwords from AHK is to use windows environment variables.
So go into env variables and make a new one called something like “googlepw” and it’s value should be your Google password.
Then in the script you can just call them as if they’re defined in the script:
#g:: Send text %googlepw%(I’m on mobile, so you may have to monkey around with quotes to get that to work)
That will include your password into any debug report of any application that includes the environment in the debug report (most) and in general all applications will have access to it.
I also use AHK for this. But I just send the clipboard variable.
Step 1: In FireFox, make a new bookmark with the location:
javascript:(function(w){ var arr = ['contextmenu','copy','cut','paste','mousedown','mouseup','beforeunload','beforeprint']; for(var i = 0, x; x = arr[i]; i++){ if(w['on' + x])w['on' + x] = null; w.addEventListener(x, function(e){e.stopPropagation()}, true); }; for(var j = 0, f; f = w.frames[j]; j++){try{arguments.callee(f)}catch(e){}}})(window);Step 2: Drag the bookmark to your toolbar.
Step 3: ??? ::: When a website does bullshit like not allow you to paste, not allow you to right click, etc. Click the button you made in step 2. :::
Step 4: Profit
It is your browser, your computer. You decide what code runs on it.
Bonus Step: Install something like ublock origin or noscript and stop allowing websites to run any code they like willy nilly on your PC without permission. Half of that crap just tracks you for no real benefit (to you).
How would step 1 work if you ELI5
It overrides the events that websites use to disable the operations (right click, copy, paste etc.) With code that stops the website’s code running.
Essentially restoring their default functionality.
Clicking the bookmark executes the JavaScript.
Edit: I discovered that for Firefox users there’s a simpler way than exposing your secrets to someone’s third-party addon. Simply open about:config, search for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, and change it from true to false.
Do NOT do this unless you absolutely know what you are doing and it will break legitimate uses of clipboard on websites. Use it one time and revert immediately.
Yeah, that seems like it would be a problem for a bunch of sites. Anything with rich text like Google Docs or somewhere you paste images to upload them seems like it could be broken by disabling all clipboard events.
I am curious, what will it break?
It prevents any website being able to run intercepts on pasting. This is good when they’re using it to just prevent you from doing it for no real reason but there are many situations where you don’t want a user to be able to arbitrarily just drop text into a text field.
The big one is 2fa. A lot of the time you might need to enter a five digit code and each number may need to be entered into a particular box if you just click in the first box and press paste after copying the code from an email then it’ll paste the entire contents into that one box. You don’t want that you want some code to automatically paste each letter into each subsequent box, that requires you intercept the original paste command.
One big use is the ability to copy and paste images, like imgur or (my use case) Whatsapp Web. I’ve heard Google Docs acts poorly as well.
Simply open about:config, search for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, and change it from true to false.
Indeed, the upsides to this outweigh the downsides. I can’t even remember the last time I needed to re-enable it.
Thank you. Its wonderful to see someone else feesl this way. I feel there are less than there used to be like 5 or 10 years ago but man it urks me. I was really excited by the add on but honestly im not sure I want to give it that permission which stinks. Would love to disable that behavior. Its so stupid to force you to make an easy password.
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Ctrl+shift+L for bitwarden and I’m set. It could be bit of a pain to shift all your passwords from all sources into bitwarden but it pays back well. Same on mobile too. Indispensable tool for me
Bitwarden is fantastic. I use it on my phone as well. I also highly recommend it.
Ive really only noticed this issue when filling out bank account or routing numbers, where it will let you paste in the account number in one field but not in the verify field which is so annoying
but yeah Ctrl+shift+L is the best
