Penetration Testing: Re: Whitespace in passwords

["Bruce K. Marshall" <bkmlstsgohere () comcast net>]

Bryan,

I don't believe there is any reason that people are discouraged from using 
the space character other than application programming restrictions.  If the 
space character was a field delimeter or otherwise broke the coded password 
processing function the programmers wouldn't allow it in a password.
I don't see this restriction very often these days.  But we do have 
Microsoft treating the space character differently than any other.  They 
don't classify it as lowercase, uppercase, number, or symbol when checking 
the password against complexity requirements.  I consider it a symbol, and 
it falls within the top 10 most popular symbols when analyzing password 
choices.  But even then it is not a popular character.
Making complete use of all available characters is important for increasing 
the difficulty of password cracking.  It isn't enough to just make the space 
character available and then only encourage people to use letters and 
numbers.
----
Bruce K. Marshall - bkmarshall () passwordresearch com
Password Research Institute - http://www.passwordresearch.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "bryan allott" <homegrown () bryanallott net>
To: <pen-test () securityfocus com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 4:19 AM
Subject: Whitespace in passwords


> generally, and i dont know if this is social conditioning due to the 
> misnomer "passWORD" rather than passPHRASE but it seems that [most?] 
> people choose passes that dont contain whitespaces, and in fact, there are 
> some system implementations that wont allow whitespaces in the password.
> my main question, re security, is wether the whitespace made the password 
> too vulnerable? [historically] and why this constraint is introduced in 
> many systems.. [but then, if myth- why propogate it?]
> i'm thinking that whitespaces [if yr system can handle them, and why not?] 
> would add another measure of complexity in cracking pwds?

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