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Comment by Retric

3 days ago

I’m doubtful a 30 digit minimum password is a meaningful improvement over a 20 digit password here. Meanwhile actually typing in very long passwords adds up across a workday/year especially with mistakes.

I think if done right, typing that password should be more like a once a quarter exception rather than a daily occurrence.

Granted - there are blockers to getting there. IDK why for example, macOS can't use Touch ID from a cold boot, that's stupid, at least when there haven't been too many failed attempts or anything.

  • > macOS can't use Touch ID from a cold boot

    Isn't that because the Secure Enclave (the only place which contains the Touch ID biometric data) is locked by your password?

    "When a user's password is set up on an Apple Silicon Mac, the password is passed through a one-way hashing algorithm that produces a key used to encrypt the Secure enclave's key."[0]

    [0] https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2023/04/14/the-security-encl...

  • Touch ID isn’t that secure. It’s fine for personal devices, but I wouldn’t trust it alone in a government or cooperate environment.

    A ~1:50,000 error rate per finger added sounds fine, but lose a few laptops and have multiple valid fingerprints etc and the odds quickly look significantly worse. Or a janitor could end up trying to log into a significant number of machines etc.

You're only supposed to type your password at most once a day to sign into SSO.

  • Then how do you suggest authenticating not just in the morning but after lunch, going to the bathroom, any physical meetings, etc?