Bach Seat

Followers of the Bach Seat know that passwords suck. And now Microsoft (MSFT) has joined me in that revelation. The boys in Redmond recently recommended that organizations no longer force employees to change their password every 60 days.

In a TechNet blog penned by Aaron Margosis, a principal consultant for Microsoft, the company called the practice – once a cornerstone of enterprise identity management – “ancient and obsolete” as it told IT, administrators, that other approaches are much more effective in keeping users safe.

Periodic password expiration is an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value, and we don’t believe it’s worthwhile for our baseline to enforce any specific value

In the latest security configuration baseline for Windows 10, which allows administrators to use Microsoft-recommended GPO baselines for improving the overall security posture of a system and reduce a Windows 10 machine’s attack surface, “May 2019 Update” (1903) – (available as a ZIP file for download here) Microsoft dropped the idea that passwords should be frequently changed. Previous baselines had advised enterprises to mandate a password change every 60 days. (And that was down from an earlier 90 days.)

Mr. Margosis acknowledged that policies to automatically expire passwords – and other group policies that set security standards – are often misguided. He wrote,

The small set of ancient password policies enforceable through Windows’ security templates is not and cannot be a complete security strategy for user credential management … Better practices, however, cannot be expressed by a set value in a group policy and coded into a template.

Among those other, better practices, Mr. Margosis mentioned multi-factor authentication – also known as two-factor authentication – and banning weak, vulnerable, easily guessed, or frequently revealed passwords.

ComputerWorld points out that Microsoft is not the first to doubt the convention. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) made similar arguments as it downgraded regular password replacement. “Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically),” NIST said in a FAQ that accompanied the June 2017 version of SP 800-63, “Digital Identity Guidelines,” using the term “memorized secrets” in place of “passwords.”

Then, the institute had explained why mandated password changes were a bad idea this way:

Users tend to choose weaker memorized secrets when they know that they will have to change them in the near future. When those changes do occur, they often select a secret that is similar to their old memorized secret by applying a set of common transformations such as increasing a number in the password.

Both the NIST and Microsoft urged organizations to require password resets when there is evidence that the passwords had been stolen or otherwise compromised. And if they haven’t been touched? “If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it,” Microsoft’s Margosis said.

John Pescatore, the director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute told ComputerWorld;

I agree 100% with Microsoft’s logic for enterprises, which are who uses [group policies] anyway … Forcing every employee to change passwords at some arbitrary period almost invariably causes more vulnerabilities to appear in the password reset process (because there are now frequent spikes of users forgetting their passwords) which increases risk more than the forced password reset ever decreases it.

Like Microsoft and NIST, SAN’s Pescatore thought periodic password resets are the hobgoblins of little minds, “Having [this] as part of the baseline makes it easier for security teams to claim compliance because auditors are happy,” Pescatore told ComputerWorld. “Focusing on password reset compliance was a huge part of all the money wasted on Sarbanes-Oxley audits 15 years ago. A great example of how compliance does not equal security.”

ComputerWorld notes other changes in the Windows 10 1903 draft baseline, Microsoft also dropped policies for the BitLocker drive encryption method and its cipher strength. The prior recommendation was to use the strongest available BitLocker encryption, but that, Microsoft said, was overkill: (“Our crypto experts tell us that there is no known danger of [128-bit encryption] being broken in the foreseeable future,” MSFT’s Margosis told ComputerWorld.) And it could easily degrade device performance.

Microsoft is also looking for feedback on a proposed change that would drop the forced disabling of Windows’ built-in Guest and Administrator accounts. Microsoft’s Margosis hedged a bit;

Removing these settings from the baseline would not mean that we recommend that these accounts be enabled, nor would removing these settings mean that the accounts will be enabled,”Removing the settings from the baselines would simply mean that administrators could now choose to enable these accounts as needed.

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We have covered this before, forcing users to change passwords over short time-frames inevitably leads to users choosing the simplest, most memorable, and most crackable passwords possible. Things have changed over the years, including technology that now enables threat actors to crack simplistic passwords easily.

MSFT is now actively pushing MFA in the enterprise so it is not surprising they are going away from this general password policy.

MSFT changing its security baselines won’t change requirements made by regulatory authorities (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, NERC) and auditors. It takes years and years for them to change.

The change does not affect home users – but maybe it will make them think?

Slowly the world of passwords is starting to come under control.

Related articles

• Systems administrators: You need to know about this Windows 10 1903 patching change (ZDnet)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.