Lately I google for someone that should give me a direct, exact result. First five links are fucking paid ads.

Well that just solved the question of “what should I watch tonight?”

For anyone unfamiliar with the source.

https://archive.org/stream/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream_202202/I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream_djvu.txt

What you want is NIST 800-63b https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecret

Specifically sections 5.1.1.1 and 5.1.1.2.

Excerpt from 5.1.1.2 pertaining to complexity and rotation requirements:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

Appendix A of the document contains their reasoning for changing from the previous common wisdom.

The tl;dr of their changes boil down to length is more important than any other factor when it comes to password security.

Edit to add:

In my personal opinion, organizations should be trying to move away from passwords as much as possible. If your IT team seems to think this system is so important that they need to rotate passwords every month, they should probably be transitioning to hardware security tokens, passkeys, or worst case, password with non-sms MFA.

Now I know nothing about the actual circumstances and I know there are plenty of reasons why that may not be possible in this specific case, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention it.

Any organization still doing this is a decade behind best practices. NIST published new recommendations years ago that specified getting rid of the practice of regular forced password resets specifically because they encourage bad practices that make passwords weaker.

Of course it doesn’t help that there are some industry compliance standards that have refused to update their requirements, but I don’t know of any that would require monthly password changes.

They actually have a fairly comprehensive training program setup through their “University.” They also mix in foreign contractors, usually from China.

I almost did before the outage. Their pay was pretty low compared to similar positions at other companies though.

Ah shit, serves me right for posting off the cuff…

Though that is also a thing.

They’re fully vertically integrated from the silicone through the compiler, os, and all software running.