For that particular bug, yes, but there have been many other variations on that theme and not limited to Apple tech. I’ve seen it nuke an email send for example because the SMTP server choked on emojis placed in a subject, to, or from line.
You would be amazed at how ancient and poorly maintained many web servers are on the modern internet. SQL injection still consistently make the top 3 web app vulnerabilities as of 2021. If that isn’t being sanitized properly I don’t expect emojis would be handled much better.
The website should feed your password straight into a well known hashing algorithm or key derivation function that has undergone a decade or more of careful scrutiny, without any other processing. The output will usually be a fixed length base64 or hex string.
There’s a short list of about three options that are currently considered acceptable, and a few more are probably fine but are a little too easy to crack these days (e.g. anything that shares the same math as bitcoin… what if someone throws a mining datacentre at your password?)
If the site breaks, maybe you don’t to be a customer of that service.
It’s not the processing on the server that’s the problem. To reach the server the password needs to go through several layers of character encoding, if any of them fails the server will receive something different from what you meant. And when you try to login from another device and the layers will be different you’ll effectively be sending a different password.
The same character encoding that would break emoji would break a significant portion of the words names, so if your system can’t handle it, then you deserve all the trouble that you run into.
You’re not wrong, but some systems, especially smaller ones are intended for English-only situations (or originally were) so non-English language situations might not be as well tested and/or may cause things to break.
Remember there are some sites that still refuse service if you put a " in your password. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s a definite possibility.
and there are many trash implementations that dont recognise something like :emoticon: as shortcut and turn it into emoji, no no you have to use emoji keyboard to type them
Sounds like a crappy implementation of the authentication server then, and the sysadmin deserves a paddlin’ for not stripping non-UTF characters (or making sure they work).
My problem with using emojis as part of the password would rather be that while I might be able to enter them on my personal Android phone using the exact keyboard app I have installed right now, I might find myself struggling on a desktop computer or any other phone that doesn’t have this exact keyboard installed. After all, the graphical representation of the same emoji might look different there, and there is a chance I couldn’t even recognize it.
So if anything, I’d say use a non-UTF keyboard like Thai or Chinese, but then a standard character in that specific type. Keyboards layout can be installed across devices and are fully standardized, even if the same character looks slightly different.
There’s no such thing as a non-UTF8 character. You mean non-UTF8 bytes? If a system sees those, it should reject the entire input, not try to patch it up.
Jeez, you're right. We got pens, pencils, stock charts, even those folders with the colored label tabs, but no stapler, the most basic of office equipment.
In my experience the only one that works with any degree of reliability is YouTube. Even the Netflix one can be fairly intermittent.
Also a lot in the time you’ll go away and the hotel you’re in will have a smart TV and the software was last updated in 2011 so you have to sign in on the device.
I’ve had to manually type in passwords on a TV several times in the last few months because sometimes the login for even the biggest brand-name services is just broken.
Edit: Oh. Did a “Wooosh” happen to me right now? Are you being ironic and referring to the XKCD thing about how to make a secure password using words in phrases?
Well they have to be the same on different devices, like you log in to Lemmy on your PC and then on your phone. Also sometimes it seems the icons change, or there are new ones and maybe old ones are removed …
Emojis are standardized. They may look different in different devices, but the code of a “raised hands” emoji will always be the same, just like the code for A is always the same.
That’s a good question, and yeah, I guess you’d either avoid using emojis or accept the fact that they’re not universally supported.
Having said that, some people use non-ascii characters in their passwords, such as Œ which is a valid letter in some alphabets, and they’d run onto the same issue.
I’ll let you be in charge of teaching them that. I literally had to talk someone through how to type an exclamation mark today, I don’t think they’re going to handle the extended Unicode character set.
But it’s actually possible to set a password with emojis anyways (or at least for domain accounts). I successfully logged in on a VM using the Hyper-V window and pasting the emoji from the host. You can also name an account a single emoji and windows actually handles it decently. It’s very likely to break a lot of programs though.
Its worked on desktops for years and works right now. As someone else pointed out "win+." works as well. Or maybe its supposed to be the only way it works and mine is bugged? Idk. I found it via trying to lock my desktop and mistyping.
oh, I never tried. There goes that option. Wonder if that was intention to prevent people from trying to use emoji passwords because they didn't trust windows to handle it.
It’s probably just because the emoji panel is a program and the lock screen has very limited or any capabilities to run any programs. And trying to make it the emoji panel to function on the lock screen is pretty much a waste of time anyways.
No. There’s only one piece of advice that should be given to users in 2023 about how to make their passwords stronger:
Use a password manager
Just use 32 character random alphanumeric passwords that are unique for each site (you can do more like 12-16 characters if you’ll ever need to enter manually).
This is it. Stop trying to create clever passwords that you can remember. You aren’t as uniquely creative as you think and there’s been bodies of research into how the various things people do to create passwords that look secure can reduce the generation space so much that they become considerably easier to crack with an intelligent algorithm.
algorithmtyping f or d for consonants and vowels respectively in sentences I thought up, switching languages regularly,
and a stable 56% by just typing randomly and adjusting my patterns based on the colored output, which might have skewed my results. Certainly a very cool tool, I also liked the explanation linked on the page!
I prefer picking a sentence or so that has meaning to me, using the first letters, and then adjusting for numbers/symbols. So if I wanted to make that a pw, it’d be 1ppa505thm2m,utfl,atafn/5. -looks completely unintelligible, but as long as you can remember the sentence and have some ideas of how you would have encoded it, easy enough to remember/recreate.
Just use these methods for the pws you either need to know (like your password manager) or don’t want stored for whatever reason, like your bank. Otherwise, yeah, just let your password manager generate a password for whatever site.
It’s as easy to remember a bunch of those as it is remembering 4 random words with no association, I think. And besides, just use that for the big, important, pws like your pw manager.
If your strategy is to just use dictionary words your password will have little entropy and even less so if you use grammatically correct sentences. If the attacker knows this is your strategy of choosing passwords cracking one is way easier than cracking a password that has the same length but consists of randomly chosen characters.
Your password is only safe because the attacker doesn’t know your strategy of choosing the password which forces him to use inefficient methods of cracking it, while there would be a more efficient way if he knew the strategy you used. Which is security by obscurity.
The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they’re a lot easier for humans to remember.
There are enough words in any language that it’s virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they’re in the dictionary.
Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.
And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:
Random websites get 24 randomly generated printable characters stored in my password manager. This is essentially unbreakable with conventional methods and can easily be adapted to fit whichever counterproductive rules the website enforces.
My password manager and my home computers get memorable but long phrases. A particular favorite is to start in the middle of a line from a song and continue from there. Nobody’s going to guess “make you swear and curse when you′re chewing on” but it’s easy to memorize of you already know the song. Even a dictionary attack is going to have trouble with that many words.
My work accounts get the bare minimum that complies with whichever rules the admins came up with. Numbers, special characters and mixed capitalization? No thirty letter phrase for you, then; you’ll get the minimum eight characters so I have a chance of memorizing the thing. Regular password changes? Great, now the last two chargers are going to be incrementing digits, just like for everyone else.
There’s a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.
I like doing entire phrases with some rhymes thrown in. Makes it easier to remember them.
“BonyTonyMoansHe’sOnlyGrownLonely” has a shitload of characters, and a full sentence (even a nonsensical one like that) is more memorable to me than a random handful of disparate words.
The more ridiculous, the better. (And, naturally, don’t forget your numbers and symbols)
EDIT: Actually, no idea why I made it all one group of words. So long as spaces are in the password’s character space (and they very well should be if friggin’ emojis are), there’s nothing stopping you from doing an entire, punctuated sentence- other than that we’ve been conditioned not to think of a password that way.
“Skinny Kenny’s friend, Mini Ben, has 20 chins.” That should be a fully-acceptable password with 46 characters (48 if you add the quotes), capital letters, numbers, and special characters.
You can’t compare a 46 random character password to a password composed out of words, the entropy of each is very different. Your kind of password is vulnerable to dictionary attacks which are way more common and easy than brute forcing every possibility. A 50+ characters unique random password for each service that is stored in a password manager which is encrypted with a 20+ characters random password is the most secure and future proof (for now).
If the attacker doesn’t know that you’re using a dictionary password, then dictionary attacks probably won’t be their first choice. I want to remember these passwords across devices and on guests.
Like someone else said on this thread; that’s just security by obscurity, which is bad. Dictionary attacks will be one of the first (brute force related) attacks attackers will use because word passwords are incredibly popular (though admittedly of fewer words: VeryBigDog34 etc…), and relatively easy to do. I agree that having the password across different devices is somewhat of a challenge with a password manager, but not impossible. My very long and complex password is all down to muscle memory by this point, I couldn’t tell you what it is from memory.
Also you shouldn’t use the same password on multiple things and if you don’t use a password manager you will need to memorize a lot of different passwords.
Dictionary attacks aren’t some magic bullet. There are a lot of english words and just four of them IS comparable in cracking difficult to a standard 8-char password that is as random as you can make it. There are a lot more words than there are symbols. Four words is obviously not as good as 46 totally random chars
Dictionary attacks are definitely not a magic bullet, they require a lot of processing power, just like any other brute-force attack, but not more because of their longer length, as has been implied.
True, there are a lot of english words, but the amount of common words is relatively small. Most people aren’t going to choose a password like “MachicolationRemonstranceCircumambulationSchadenfreude”, even if it were generated for them (which is unlikely).
Sure, it is comparable to a standard 8 characters passward, but even that kind of password is verging on the insecure (it is the absolute minimum, which should be avoided when possible).
There are also a lot of symbols when you count emojies and the entire Unicode standard.
Edit: plus brute forcing is just one scenario. I think the xkcd comic refers to using passwords in online services, and those usually have some sort of rate limiting.
8 character a-zA-Z is 45 bits of entropy (log2(56^8), about the same as the XKCD password if you take from a 2048 word list. That’s crackable in a minute on AWS.
Password hashes get frequently stolen, don’t rely on rate limiting if it’s something you really care about.
Sure, but the average English speaker knows way more than 2048 words. Let’s not forget about case sensitivity, made-up or “inside joke” words, names, and specific industry vocabulary.
Even if you take four words of a 30000 word list (quick Google says that’s the number of words an average person knows), that’s still less bits of entropy than a 5 word diceware password (7776 word list). People are also really bad at randomness, so your own string of random words is likely going to be much worse.
It’s the concept of literally using a die to choose with randomness (humans are terrible at trying to be random); a link with details is in a previous comment.
Two of my colleagues still use locally stored plaintext for individual work credentials, despite having been shown where the password manager is. Both have accessed their files in front of me. If it’s not in those files it’s saved in the browser (because convenience is a hell of a drug). Now you start to see why discrete managers have a hard time, even amongst technology workers.
Same. I never used emojis until I met my SO, and then my emoji use skyrocketed. They’re a nice way of succinctly articulating some thoughts and emotions.
If I’m going to be relaying through to people strictly over text as much as I do these days, I better have a way to articulate it with the right emotional range to match my sparkling personality ✨
I’m convinced emojis are what has been missing from language for a long time. They are great way to portray emotions through texts, which otherwise could not be achieved.
😠 I hate it when people do that because the emoji don’t mean anything. Like I can use a single emoji to actually relay some information but just putting a bunch of them doesn’t do anything.
People who use them tend to spam the hell out of them. Like, 8 of the same emoji. And they use them every other sentence. It’s obnoxious, you only need one or two to get the point across.
They didn’t exist yet when I was an early teenager, all we had were emoticons that might be replaced by images by the forum software, so of course I think they’re stupid /s
Without sarcasm, it is a good thing we have standardized symbols now and don’t have to implement emoticon replacement into forum or chat or social media software. If only because half of such implementations replaced any occurrence of the number 8 followed by a closing parenthesis with 😎 even when that wasn’t the intended meaning (one can think of many other times one would end a parenthetical statement with the number 8).
Sounds great where it works but I’m sure most systems would reject an emoji or make you type out some overly complex password in addition to your emoji.
Honestly you’d be surprised how many places it just works magically. I was surprised to find that Office365 users could use emojis in names for Microsoft Teams which had no problem syncing those accounts back to an on-prem Active Directory. You can use emojis to name a whole SQL database, let alone users/passwords on it.
I keep wondering if I need to figure out how to turn that off but it hasn’t caused any problems. It’s definitely sketchy looking though when you see a bunch of normal usernames and then suddenly one is just ten snowman emojis in a row.
Emojis are just a string of special characters that get recognised and replaced by an image anyway. It is the same as using those special characters separately.
It’s all just Unicode so in theory a password system shouldn’t think that emoji or any more interesting than any other character. To a computer the letter B and the emoji ✈️ equivalent in that they’re both just normal characters that one can type.
Sort of, emoji are usually treated as two or more normal characters so ✈️ might be equivalent to BB. But the basic point is the same.
It should work reasonably well in password systems that hash the password from a UTF-8 encoding… Which should be most things really. If the system is trying to process everything with ASCII, maybe not. It might even appear to work but get converted to some other character (which is kind of the worst case)… That should be rare in web applications though
As a software developer who has worked with a lot of symbols and emoji… PLEASE DON’T DO THIS.
Software doesn’t all handle these symbols the same way, and without tech knowledge (or even with) , it’s very possible to not be able to log in easily. I’m kinda drunk rn, but I’ll try to explain as simply as I can…
For example… skintone emojis are actually two characters, a face and a skin tone modifier. I think those ones are always two characters but some of these “multi-char” characters can be normalized into a single character. But not everyone handles this the same way. For example, Safari might normalize the emoji, but Firefox might treat it as two separate characters… And this would probably make your password not match. But basically… text has lots of edge cases; I’d advise to use normal passwords please (also maybe a password manager)
It was pretty normal lol. Basically everything between the visual of an emoji and what “text” is entered is not in your control. So it’s great for security but not in practice as a password. What brand was the kombucha I want some.
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll be sure to use non-printing characters instead of emojis for my passwords! (They can’t guess it if it’s invisible right?)
In all seriousness, why are people so adverse to using password managers? People are plenty willing to use the browsers built-in “remind my password” instead of a proper password solution such as bitwarden… And they come up with such “hacks” just to avoid using a proper length password.
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