am already use:
._.
Classic old school manual emojis.
Emoticons for you kids.
Okay now’s my time to shine. The words “emoji” and “emoticon” are false cognates, as in they aren’t actually related. Emoticon is a few-decade old word to describe emotion+icon, like :)
Emoji is Japanese (kanji - 絵文字) for picture-word, basically. It super outdates computers.
They just happen to sound similar; isn’t that fun?
Last week or two I’ve been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I’ll take the crypto.
What’s crypto?
Well you see there’s this thing called the Blockchain, it’s like a ledger…
Man, I sure wish I could get on the ground floor of this exciting new technology as an investor.
Might be too late for that, but BOY do I have a bridge to sell you!
You’re kidding. A real-life bridge!? You can own those!? Name your price.
Yes!
You can even change it into a toll road and return your investment in no time!
Cryptography. As in, using encryption and encryption keys to authenticate me, rather than just a password.
Cryptography
I’m not sure what the passkey advantage over long unique password in a password database is.
Well, KeepAssXC just got passkey support so I guess it doesn’t matter much
With passkeys, your browser and the website exchange a public-private key pair then make up long random one-time “passwords” every time you login but only use them to check they each still have the right key.
I guess I’m gonna need the answer spoonfed to me. I think I understand how the tech works but I don’t understand the advantage over a complex non-reused password. Maybe keyloggers, if it’s one-time thing?
There are lots of advantages:
- No need to worry about password encoding, like this emoji debacle for example. Actually there’s no need to worry about passwords in general anymore, no more worries about lenghts, encoding, character space, remembering them etc.
- It eliminates that scam where attackers set up a site on a domain that looks like the correct one, because the domain is part of the protocol.
- It eliminates phishing for 2FA because login only works on your device anyway and there’s nothing you can be tricked into giving away to an attacker.
- If attackers break into a site and steal the public keys they can’t use them for anything.
- Since the whole process is automated between servers and browsers and also standardized, it can be upgraded seamlessly and continously, you can upgrade the protocol, the key lengths, the encryption cyphers etc. with zero impact for the user. New upgraded versions can be distributed to both servers and browsers and they’ll just use the highest version they both have.
- 2FA is a core part of the protocol, but again in a way that eliminates phishing: it’s basically a way to unlock access temporarily to one specific key in your key vault. You can use a master password, or an USB key, or TOTP codes, or biometrics (fingerprint or face) etc., but NOT cellular texts (SMS) anymore because the vault stays on your devices, no need for another party to send you anything.
- Syncing your vault online and over multiple devices, as well as backup, are also a core part of the approach and will eliminate the worry that you drop your phone and you’re screwed forever.
The downside is that there’s been a whole bunch of tools and apps and services built around passwords for decades and converting all that mass to passkey tools will take a bit.
There are some other tradeoffs like, right now for example I can reasonably print all my passwords and TOTP codes on a few sheets of paper and achieve an “offline” backup in case of untimely death and so on, it’s going to be a bit more cumbersome with passkeys. But I expect there will be ways to optimize that as the technology evolves.
Passkeys, under the hood, use a way of proving your identity that doesn’t require you to actually send your password, and also doesn’t require you to send your username either.
Because of how it’s implemented, the system managing the passkeys also gets to authenticate that the website is who it says it is.So no private data actually gets sent anywhere, but you can prove your identity while also checking the identity of the site you’re talking to, like the SSL lock icon but automated. It’s often implemented such that the device that holds they keys can’t actually have them stolen from it, and it’s integrated with a biometric sensor.
This means it’s possible to have a high degree of confidence that the person logging in is physically the same person who created the credential, and not just someone who had their password stolen.The final perk, is that if you’re using something like a phone with a fingerprint scanner, passkeys work as two factors of authentication, despite only feeling like one.
Because the phone verifies your identity via fingerprint (something you are), it can then unlock the key that is uniquely available to the phone (something you have).Combine that with being generally easier to use, and it’s pretty clear why most security experts are pushing them. Security that users will use is better than security they won’t, and finally we have easier to use security that’s also better than the more difficult options.
The advantage - from my very incomplete understanding - is that your passkeys cannot be phished or stolen from you. So only you from your device can log-in to the site. Which leaves me with the question, how cross-device passkeys work.
That would be a really nice advantage but yeah, I wonder how cross-device passkeys or recovery passkeys would work
There are different ways.
One way is to use an encryption module on the device that, rather than storing the keys just encrypts the keys and holds an encryption key that you can’t extract, and can do various crypto operations.
Now you ask the module to do a secure key exchange algorithm with the new device, meditated by a party the module trusts, like apple or something.
Now both devices share a secret key, and they trust that the other is owned by the same user because the owner verified with apple who then signed the exchange messages.
Old device decrypts with the old key, and encrypts with the new key, never letting the data leave the secure module. Send the data to the new device which can do the reverse, and both devices forget the shared password.Overall, minor weaknesses like storing keys in the cloud encrypted by a key derived from a password that the cloud never sees, while objective weaknesses, are still significant net improvements to security over passwords.
Thank you for explaining. That’s a thing most sites leave out: tell people how the keys cannot be stolen while still working on a different device.
Big reason for that is the spec for how this all works being around for a while, giving people a lot of time to write about the core of how it works, but the viable popular implementations are far newer, so articles still haven’t been updated, and doing the key transfers is still one of the newest parts that the big vendors don’t want to talk about yet, because they still have to get their patents fully approved and everything.
What I described above is one way to move data between two devices in a secure way with a trusted intermediary to verify identity, but I have no idea if it’s how any major vendor actually does it, because they haven’t made that data public. It’s just what’s obvious to a sufficiently informed subject matter expert.
Oh for fuck’s sake, just turn on 2FA
Until you get to a prompt that doesn’t support unicode.
Security expert reveals surprising way to induce headaches
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?
win+.(works on kde too afaik…?)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.
this feeeels like the stupidest idea ive ever heard… its not like theres really an emojii standard applied as universally as text, across devices or applications… the transforms that happen… this seems fraught with terribleness
am i missing something?
If this isn’t satire, that’s literally what Unicode and UTF-8 are
Yes there is,
. I would say most modern devices/systems utilize it too. The reason they may look different from device to device is because the presentation style can be modified by vendors, somewhat similar to using different fonts to make letters look styled.
Although I agree it is risky, emoji are unicode characters, just like any other unicode character. If, and that’s a big if, the programmers do their job right, it shouldn’t matter if you use an emoji or a random kanji. It’s all just another character. That said, I don’t trust programmers enough to run the risk. Your password might work fine on the website but then fail on the mobile app.
Someone else said “good luck on the desktop”, but Windows actually has an emoji picker built right in. Win+. will bring it up. Another fun fact, usernames and computer names both support the full unicode set on Windows, including emoji. Some fun can be had with that knowledge. I haven’t tried it on Linux or MacOS yet.
I thought Emojis were a set standard but how they’re rendered can change. So whatever it is that identifies the heart emoji is universal but iPhone, Samsung, Google, etc might render that heart differently.
How they’re rendered is a set standard now too. For example there was a bit of an issue where the gun emoji could be a water pistol pointing left or a revolver pointing right… and when it was combined with a person emoji… that could lead to… issues. It’s a water pistol everywhere now.
I didn’t know that, thanks
You mean Apple changed it to a water gun and everyone followed suite as to not have an issue?
Thanks, America, and your mass shootings.
Emojis are standardized exactly the same way as text is, both are defined by the unicode standard. They might not be rendered uniformly, the same way that text rendering depends on the font.
Good luck logging in a Smart TV.
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!
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.
But not all apps, sadly, I just experimented it with Crunchyroll, and saw my dad struggling with a crappy app called Vix yesterday.
Fair enough. I’m mostly using “big ones” plus SmartTube.
Security Experts probably don’t log into smart tvs all that often. Just a guess.
Sorta how car designers never have to actually fix cars.
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.
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
Car expert
Well how about my paddle car
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Scan the QR code and log in on your phone. Oooh scary
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.
Logging in a smart tv? Lol!
Anyone who takes any kind of advice from the fucking New York Post deserves what they get.
Can you write any unicode cahracter? Gotta make passwords in cuneiform
(👁 ͜ʖ👁) 𓂺
-The most secure password
Wingdings for life baby!
Wingdings is a font.
That was a joke. There now we both said something that was plainly obvious.
or just use special characters of languages like: ą, ę, ø, č
Do you have trouble on physical keyboards?
Programmable or modded keyboard with qmk and you can physical key some pretty wacky stuff if you really wanted to.
Or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space ? But seriously, just use unique random strings likely through a password manager.
Long time ago a friend of mine used a set of key press to generate a smiley face to put in his bios which ended up in a situation where he was not able to type in the same smiley face into the password prompt. I had to teach him to reset his bios battery to get back into the bios.
You’re a good friend
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
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
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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.
also some OSKs put whitespaces after inserting an emoji, some doesn’t. there’s no unified emoji input method yet.
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.
Stripping characters from passwords, great idea! Right up there with truncating passwords that are too long.
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Doing that is actually a great way to tell attackers that you’re vulnerable to that type of attack.
Bypassing those front end restrictions is super easy, and the attackers don’t need an account or a password to attack you.
It’s like putting a sign that says “lock fragile; don’t tug” on the door to your business.
It’s like putting a sign that says “lock fragile; don’t tug” on the door to your business.
That one made me chuckle, it really do be like that 😂
Learn how to sanitise your database inputs first, damnit!
That’s not how any of this works.
First of all, stripping passwords is never okay. You can reject the password and let the user choose a new one, but never just modify it on your own.
Then, if your system is at risk of code injection by certain characters in user input, please just shut it down and never turn it on again.
That only applies to iphones that came out 2016 or earlier and we’re never updated right?
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.
Thanks I appreciate the clarification
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.
Thanks I wasn’t aware of that
auth servers breaking from emojis would be hilarious, pretty sure that’s why older auth servers only allow certain symbols in passwords
“Your password ‘🤣umådbrø⁉️’ is breaking our server. Please change it.”
“Of course. What is the server’s root password?”
OTOH, there is only one character set that matters, and any system using a different one is, by that fact alone, broken.
I said only one that matters. So I already did pick one. It’s called Unicode.
UTF-8 and UTF-16 pretty much do everything, but if you have a UTF-16 emoji in a UTF-8 system, you’ll have a bad day. :(
No need to tell us how you feel every day
Those are encodings, not character sets.
IANA calls them character sets, it’s literally in the URL twice, that’s good enough for me!
If some auth server breaks because I put emojis in my password then that’s right and deserved
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.
make one account with emoji password to test their system, if it break, good, go create hour account somewhere else
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.
It’s not the 90s anymore.
That is very much not a 90s problem. Especially if the company has a website and an app or is a small company not thinking about these things.
In theory this shouldn’t be an issue but it definitely could be an issue on certain services.
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.
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.
Can you still log in to wellsfargo accounts using the T9 translation of your password?
For petty services where you don’t want to have to break out the password manager, try making your own mental salted hash.
Pick four long words at random. Assign each of these to the four quadrants of the alphabet.
A-F - Equipment
G-M - Triumphant
N-S - Sampling
U-Z - Fatigued
Pick one number:
4
Now, take the first letter of the service that the password is for, and that selects your quadrant word. Take the number of letters in the service and multiply it against your number. Take the last letter of the service, and on your querty keyboard, move all the way to the right of thst line to select the first symbol there. Thats your unique password thats salted with yo ur personal words and number.
Facebook = Equipment32:
Lemmy = Triumphant20{
Pizza Hut = Sampling36{
If you want more security for these petty services, use longer words, bigger number, or use some other metric, Tweak the algorithm to make it unique to you. Maybe capitalize a middle letter in your salt word based on the length of the service name. Maybe add the first letter of the colour of the service logo to the password, EG
Facebook = Equipment32:B
Lemmy = Triumphant20{T
Pizza Hut = Sampling36{R
Petty services I would consider to be anything that’s not super critical, and is at a higher likelyhood of breaching my shit.
For banks, primary emails, or government services, use a more complex algorithm or a random string of chars from your password manager.
Just come up with one strong password (see https://xkcd.com/936/) for your password manager and use randomly generated passwords for everything else. There’s no reason to manually compute a hash every time you sign up for a service.
Also, for a non-remembering solution, use a security key with your password manager, the kind that plugs into USB and you have to tap a button to authenticate. Then you can generate a true random password and store it somewhere safe as a backup, and mainly use the key for day to day.
what about when you’re on your phone?
Many security keys have NFC, or if you’re on a modern phone, you can use USB type C (Yubikey 5C)
Authentication app is another option. I believe some password managers can be set up to take the master password once per device and then accept authenticator codes to unlock for each subsequent time.
Or, since your phone is probably a lot more locked down than your computer, almost every modern phone since like the days of the iPhone 5S has a cryptographic TPM/secure enclave in the processor while the fact that not every computer has one was a major sore spot in Windows 11 compatibility, it might also be acceptable to just leave the password manager unlocked on your phone all the time, depending on your threat model. Assuming your phone is both encrypted and password protected and you trust the OS to implement both securely, the pin on your phone works more like the pin on your credit card than a traditional password login on a non-encrypted non-TPM computer, so even if a bad actor physically had your phone, it would be very hard to actually extract data out of it without the passcode (assuming it’s just your garden variety cybercriminal and not the CIA or something), which would serve as your master password in that case. Hardware security features can also resist brute force attacks where someone clones your hard drive and hooks it up to their own computer to try and guess the encryption password without the wrong entry time delays slowing them down, a secure enclave will actually enforce the time delays with no easy bypass and can also be set to wipe the phone if you get the passcode wrong too many times.
Phone apps are also almost entirely sandboxed from each other and can’t directly access other apps’ data, so the risk of a malicious program reading the password manager’s cache or database is also far lower than most desktop operating systems.
The problem with using hash schemes like this is that when your password is leaked you can’t easily rotate the password.
Not to mention if you suddenly developed amnesia or dementia
This is what got me using a password manager. I didn’t want to trust a password manager because it felt like they would be highly targeted and one vulnerability would reveal everything. And let’s be honest they still are the same.
So I had my own scheme for generating passwords. I made myself a script that I could use on my phone and PC. It worked beautifully and effortlessly until occasionally a service would force me to choose a new password. When this started happening I made a new scheme for generating passwords and made a new script. When it first happened it was still reasonably easy because there was only one service I had to use the alternative. It started to become more difficult the more services asked for a new password.
I used my own system for several years until I had enough with trying to remember which services used the alternative scheme and wondered when I’d have to make a third scheme. And if I did then the mental complexity would significantly increase.
Interestingly only a couple of services publicly announced they had been hacked and none of my passwords have ever appeared on haveibeenpwned. So I wonder why these services asked for a new password and if they had been attacked why they chose not to announce it.
too short, for all that effort just use a sentence with a symbol and a number.
FacebookCanGoToHell!123 is more secure and easy to remember
Yeah putting the name of the service in the passphrase is actually pretty secure, unless the rest of the password is like “thisisapasswordforFACEBOOK” cause then one password gets leaked and the rest can be inferred.
Youre going to memorize a unique sentence for each service?
A method like this allows you to memorize only 4 words of arbitrary length, a number, and a simple algorthm to yield unique passwords for each service.
yes, it is what I do now. there was a time when people memorized 10, 15 phone numbers.
You can also add a standard phrase to all of them that is shared between them all just to make them more complex
Equipment32:thisismypassword
Also you can’t really “forget” a password, because it’s connected to the name of the site. Very clever
What’s up with all the hate for emojis lmao
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.
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.
This way there is a difference between:
“You are so amazing 😁👍”
and
"You are so amazing 🙄 "
"You are so amazing 🙄 "
Greatest put down ever.
🤣
🍆✊💦🍳
😔
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🚣👍👍👍👍👍👍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 sigma
the emojis and text above are a part of the reason
well that just sounds like you don’t like immature content/people
Whats the boat rowing used for typically ?
Don’t act like you don’t already know, pervert.
Traversing water using manual propulsion
😠 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.
Back in my day we only had 95 printable characters, and that’s the way we liked it! /s
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).
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.
I disagree with them.
- Emojis do not look the same on all platforms. Let’s take
white large square⬜ for example. Emojipedia shows what that emoji looks like on 26 different vendors. Some are pure white, some are shades are grey, and then there’s Microsoft who in its usual infinite wisdom decided it should be purple.large yellow square🟨 is a tossup between actually yellow and orange. This issue is also exacerbated with different displays displaying colours differently. Factors such as color accuracy, viewing angle, brightness affect how you perceive colour.
This also extends to face emojis.
grinning face with big eyes(Emojipedia link) isn’t that easy to tell apart fromgrinning eyes(Emojipedia link)- Emoji support depends on your device. I’m on Windows 11 22H2 which recently added support for
shaking face🫨. Problem is, Windows’ emoji pickerWin+.(period) doesn’t have it. Trying to login on a friends phone that’s still on iOS 15 or Android 12, beforeshaking facecame out? Enjoy manually copy/pasting the emoji from Emojipedia.
correct horse battery staple on the other hand looks the same on all devices.
- Emojis do not look the same on all platforms. Let’s take
