• jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Emojis are known to break systems in certain circumstances due to the way they’re interpreted in certain character sets.

    I guarantee people doing this will not only lock out their own accounts, but may even freeze some authentication servers.

    https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-brick-an-iphone-send-some-emojis

    https://www.itechpost.com/articles/75762/20170119/brick-iphone-using-emojis-plus-tricks-dont-know.htm

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        make one account with emoji password to test their system, if it break, good, go create hour account somewhere else

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          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.

          Unicode isn’t that hard.

    • Arin@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      auth servers breaking from emojis would be hilarious, pretty sure that’s why older auth servers only allow certain symbols in passwords

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      If some auth server breaks because I put emojis in my password then that’s right and deserved

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • kuneho@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        also some OSKs put whitespaces after inserting an emoji, some doesn’t. there’s no unified emoji input method yet.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        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.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      OTOH, there is only one character set that matters, and any system using a different one is, by that fact alone, broken.

    • 50gp@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      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

      • Funwayguy@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Hahaha, I wish.

        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.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • Jolteon@lemmy.zip
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          11 months ago

          But why wouldn’t it make sense to need to pull the cab off of a pickup truck to change the spark plugs?

        • El Barto@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          That’s true for all car designers. You’re referring to the shitty designers, though.

          Architects don’t get involved in the actual construction of a building either.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            11 months ago

            Oh they do. They come to tell you that the safety protocols you’ve implemented are interfering with their design.

            They’d prefer it if it looked pretty and then just fell down and light breeze thank you very much

    • Cavemanfreak@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      All the apps I’ve used recently use QR codes (or similar measures, like a sync code) that has you log in from the phone, so it should work anyway!

      • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        But not all apps, sadly, I just experimented it with Crunchyroll, and saw my dad struggling with a crappy app called Vix yesterday.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        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.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        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.

  • kureta@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Security expert reveals surprising way to induce headaches

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      Security experts don’t actually have to work on corporate IT systems.

      So you’ve set your password to contain a 😇 have you?
      Ok so how are you going to type it on this desktop computer keyboard here…
      Yeah I thought not.

      I’ll just go reset your password shall I?

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          11 months ago

          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.

      • lud@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        That doesn’t work on the desktop last I checked.

        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.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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          11 months ago

          It worked on my desktop

          😁👍╰(°▽°)╯

          Works even in notepad on Windows 11, lol

          • lud@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            Oh I meant the lock screen, sorry. As far as I know it works everywhere except the lock screen.

            • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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              11 months ago

              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.

              • lud@lemm.ee
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                11 months ago

                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.

        • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          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.

  • kromem@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    Test your ability to be unpredictable

    • vamputer@infosec.pub
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 months ago

        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).

        • Aatube@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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            11 months ago

            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.

        • ferret@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          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

          • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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            11 months ago

            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.

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      I love it, Bitwarden has supported generating passphrase style passwords for a while and it’s basically that. It’s my go-to these days.

      • El Barto@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Got a source on that?

        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.

    • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Just be sure to throw in symbols and numbers to beef it up. Dictionary words are easier to brute force.

      • djdadi@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Not 4 of them in a row. Keep in mind the attacker doesn’t know " look for exactly 4 words"

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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.

        • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          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.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    I’d rather staple my forehead to a telephone pole before I ever think about using an emoji in a password. Those things are abominations!

    • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Out of curiosity, what makes you say so?

      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?

      • El Barto@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think OP is conflating the use of emojis in passwords with the use of emojis by the general public.

        Yes, it’s annoying to read stuff like “Hi 😃😃😃😃 I am Bob ♥️♥️♥️😎😎😎😎,” but that doesn’t mean that using them in passwords is a bad idea.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • Polar@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Antisocial people.

      It was the same on Reddit. All of the people who despised emojis were often posting in really cringe and incel related subs.

      My use of emojis sky rocketed after I started dating. They are fun and convey emotion really well.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        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.

        This way there is a difference between:

        “You are so amazing 😁👍”

        and

        "You are so amazing 🙄 "

        • mbp@lemmy.sdf.org
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          11 months ago

          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 ✨

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      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).