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
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.
Can you still log in to wellsfargo accounts using the T9 translation of your password?
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.
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.
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.
If some auth server breaks because I put emojis in my password then that’s right and deserved
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.
Stripping characters from passwords, great idea! Right up there with truncating passwords that are too long.
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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.
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!
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.
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. :(
Those are encodings, not character sets.
IANA calls them character sets, it’s literally in the URL twice, that’s good enough for me!
No need to tell us how you feel every day
That only applies to iphones that came out 2016 or earlier and we’re never updated right?
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
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
💯🐴🔋(umm, staple)
Correct horse battery staple!
But was it a 💯 or was it a ✅? Damn neither. Let’s try with 👍…
100 horse batteries
Good luck logging in a Smart TV.
Logging in a smart tv? Lol!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Terrible idea, good luck logging in on desktop.
You know there’s someone somewhere who would answer you with, “what’s a desktop?”
I’m still in denial 😅
I began feeling old when re**itors started calling their site an ‘app’
You can say Reddit it isn’t blasphemous
Wait, you can’t type emoji on your desktop? I feel sorry for you. 🥺
I have no idea how you could either. I don’t know how to create them with s keyboard
Winkey + .
Works on Windows and some Linux distros by default
Firefox has an addon that opens up an emoji panel.
Under Windows press Win+.
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.
I got it to a stable 54% by using an
algorithm
typing 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!
How many websites/services don’t support such lengthy passwords these days?
Few, but those that don’t you can just shorten the length generated.
Oh for fuck’s sake, just turn on 2FA
Until you get to a prompt that doesn’t support unicode.
Just use a password manager, goddamn.
But only save emojis in it lol
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.
Yeah, you can lead a horse to water, and whatnot.
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!
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?
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.
Or that “hi 😊 I’m Bob” doesn’t express a (subtly) different meaning to “hi, I’m Bob”
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I can agree with you. I’m curious what these reasons are, though?
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.
Removing old ones could be a problem, though.
What if I am using a device that doesn’t support emojis? wouldn’t I need to learn the code for each emoji I have used in a password?
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.
Yes
But how many modern devices don’t somehow support emojis though?
And how many of those you need to enter a password in?
Just like a gun is standardized to a water gun for some and a real gun for others?
Edit: I get your point, ita just if you memorize your password with emoji icons different icons would screw up your tries to log in
If you search for “gun” in your device when selecting an emoji, just pick whatever comes up. Done.
Because they’re a major pain to type, except for the most common ones?
👆
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
What’s up with all the hate for emojis lmao
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🚣👍👍👍👍👍👍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 sigma
the emojis and text above are a part of the reason
Whats the boat rowing used for typically ?
Traversing water using manual propulsion
Don’t act like you don’t already know, pervert.
😠 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.
well that just sounds like you don’t like immature content/people
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.
Back in my day we only had 95 printable characters, and that’s the way we liked it! /s
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.
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.
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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 ✨
🤣
🍆✊💦🍳
😔
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).
…no
Completely useless from many sources where I have to rely on a keyboard for entering passwords.
Most modern OSes feature emoji pickers though
Mac os and windows? I haven’t seen it on my Mac but maybe on windows? Those are pretty modern. I haven’t seen it in Linux either now that I think of it.
there is a “Characters” app in Gnome that lets you pick emojis
win+. will bring it up in windows
Yup, macOS has one too.
Ctrl + ; should bring up an emoji picker in Linux when you have focused a text field
What part of the word “Keyboard” did you not understand?
Idk, mine can. https://docs.qmk.fm/#/feature_unicode
As it said in the document: With a little help from your OS. So I want to log into lemm.ee from another persons computer. I do have not my own keyboard, I neither have my additional drivers or extensions or whatever. Oops. No login.
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)
Was gonna say… you’re relying on the consistency of external emoji handlers that you don’t control. Ascii emojis are one thing.
Is my explaintion ok? The hard kombucha was… harder than I anticipated
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.
I didn’t realize NYC has a physical Juneshine location. So I got a flight… and a Juneshine cocktail…
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.
