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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
KeePass has an auto-type feature. It basically presses keystrokes right into the input field.
I never have to worry about sites disabling pasting into fields because:
- I use about:config to disable clipboard manipulation
- I use KeePass auto-type to type passwords instead of copy-pasting them
Also, putting your password on your clipboard is Bad Practice because any application (including a javascript web page) can inspect your clipboard
I could be wrong because I haven’t used KeePass in a few years… but it’s my understanding that the auto-type feature doesn’t work on every website, depending on how they’re designed.
So auto-type will work on websites where the username input field and password input field are on the same page, and where you can switch from the username field to the password field with a single tab key press.
However I don’t think it will work on sites where the username needs to be submitted first before the password field is even visible. I think signing into a Google account is an example of this.
At least that was my experience when I was using KeePass a few years ago. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
The only app that won’t let me use KeePass autotype is Planetside 2’s launcher. I’ve never had any trouble in any other app with KeePass’s auto-type feature – including to log in to Google.
If a site is asking for a username first, then I can auto-type the username too ;)
Ah ok, thanks for letting me know. I haven’t used KeePass in a long time but I’m going to download it and give it another try now. It sounds like a good idea to avoid passwords from being stored in the clipboard. Thanks.
I have written important passwords into chat windows too many times to use the auto-type function. In my case it’s much worse to use autotype because the UI isn’t obvious into which window it will autotype and press enter to send the message to everyone. At least with the clipboard I have to press the enter myself when I see I pasted it into the correct field.
But to get around that I’m actually storing my password in the browser too and syncing them between my firefox instances with my self hosted sync server.
Yes I’ve made a similar mistake in the past. On one screen I performed the auto-type and it was in the process of typing out the user/password combination, and while this was happening I clicked into a chat window on my other screen without thinking. The chat window immediately started having part of my password typing into it!
Luckily I managed to click elsewhere in time to prevent ‘enter’ being typed at the end of auto-type.
It’s just a reminder that you have to wait for auto-type to complete before you can do anything else.
The UI isn’t obvious into which window it will autotype
I found that if you click into the username field first and then switch directly to KeePass without opening/switching to any other applications in between, then when you click auto-type in KeePass, it works every time. This is because the browser window was the last used application before KeePass was selected. But yeah, it’s not an ideal user experience.
