Practicing good password management can help secure your information. Password requirements have evolved over time with routine password changes and increasingly complicated rules to achieve “strong password” status. In June 2017, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released new guidelines signaling a deviation in the approach to password management. Digital Identity Guidelines, Special Publication 800-63-3 eliminates the periodic password changes and complex configurations of numbers, letter, and characters. The guidelines call for passwords to be a “memorized secret”, which would be a sentence with a minimum of 64 characters describing a memory that only the user would know. This change will make it easier for legitimate users to remember and much harder for hackers to re-create.
To read the full NIST publication, click here.