Dumb Password Rules

Shaming sites with dumb password rules.

Contributing

Feel free to submit a pull request with dumb rules you've encountered.

See other sites for the formatting and follow these rules:

Include the name of the site with a link.
Add a clean comment about the dumb password rule (optional).
Include at least one screenshot.
Keep the sites in alphabetical order.

Admiral

Restrict the inclusion of a % character.

ADP

Forced to change the password during the first login. At least they could use proper grammar in their rule list.

Advanzia

Requires at least 6 to a maximum of 12 characters [sic!]
Allows only digits and letters without umlauts
Allows only specific special characters: ? ! $ €% & * _ = - +. ,:; / () {} [] ~ @ #
Allows no spaces

Aetna Health Insurance

Password cannot be longer than 20 characters
Password cannot have spaces and more 2 characters repeated in a row
Password cannot have user's first name, last name or username

Aigües de Barcelona

Between 6 to 10 characters
Only letters and numbers, without spaces

Air Asia

Only allows 16 characters in the password input, but does not tell you that. Why is your password invalid? It's up to you to find out!

Air France

Between 8 to 12 characters
Should contain capital, lowercase letters and numbers

Alibaba

At least 2 uppercase letters
Plus 2 lowercase letters
Plus 2 numbers
Plus 2 punctuation marks

Phew, too many rules, because why not, if Ma thinks AI stands for Alibaba Intelligence, then password rules can be equally intelligent too.

Also, this gibberish if you intentionally left the "confirm password" field empty and that's even after a en_US redirection.

请输入新的登录密码.

American Express

Sometimes I forget that caps-lock is on, glad it doesn't matter.

Ameli.fr (French national health insurance)

This was very painful to find a password that works with this one and that I can actually remember (I ended-up using my bank-account number because everything else failed). It took me maybe one hour and I thought I would become crazy (and yes, the session expires frequently while you are actually thinking about a password).

The password must be more than 8 characters
But you cannot use more than 13 characters
You can only use digits
You cannot use your birthdate or your login
You cannot use a sequence of digits (if your password happens to contain 56 or 89 it will be rejected)
You cannot repeat the same character (if your password contains 22 or 55 it will be rejected)

AmeriHealth

Their site says "All information is kept safe and secure." Just not as secure as you'd like.

User Password must be between 6 and 14 characters and contain 1 numerical value.

AmiAmi

Your password needs to be between 6 and 12 characters long, must contain only letters and numbers.

Ancestry

Password:

Must be at least 8 characters long
Must contain at least 1 number
Must contain at least 1 letter or special character
Must not be a well known or common password

ANZ Bank

Your password needs to be between 8 and 16 characters long - no special characters allowed.

AOK (German Health Insurance)

This is the online customer portal of the German health insurance company AOK. They have an extensive set of rules for both passwords and usernames.

The password rules are:

Length between 8 and 14 characters
At least one letter, one number and one special character
Special characters are: !@$%/=?`+@#_.;:{}|
The password must not start with ? or !
The password must not include the username
The password must not be the same as any of your previous passwords

The rules for the username are:

Length between 1 and 12 characters
No umlauts allowed (äöü), no special characters, no spaces, no ., no _, no ß

AOL

Between 8 and 16, so I can't go up to 20.

Apple

Can't contain 3 or more consecutive identical characters, nor can it be more than 32 characters long.

Arbeitnehmeronline

Service for managing employment documents of the German company Datev.

Only the following character categories are allowed: Letters, numbers and this special charaters set: !#$%&()*+,-./:;<=>?@[]^_`{|}~äöüßÄÖÜ

Arlo

Your password contains characters not listed. Therefore, they do not match.

Aruba Cloud

Must be different from the last 3 passwords used.

Your password must contain at least an uppercase and lowercase letter and number.

Must contain at least one special symbol.

ASN Bank

Your password needs to be between 8 and 20 characters long - at least 1 number, 1 lower case letter, 1 upper case letter, 1 special character.

AT&T

The only special characters allowed are underscores and hyphens.

Bank of America

20 character max and lots of special character restrictions. Bank of America - keeping your money safe.

Also: If you paste a password greater than 20 characters, the form truncates it without telling you or giving an error.

Banca Intesa Serbia

Online banking portal of Banca Intesa Serbia has some password restrictions. This is the translation of the requirements: No special characters, minimum number of characters is 8, maximum number of characters is 22, minimum number of upper case letters is 1, lower case also 1, numeric characters is 2, first character must be a upper or lower case letter and maximum number of character repeats is 2.

Banco Mercantil

8 to 15 chars. No special chars allowed but requires special chars. Also requires lowercase, uppercase, and numbers. Consecutive chars are prohibited. Did I mention the page hangs while you type? That eye icon tho.

Banco Nacional (Costa Rica National Bank)

Between 8 and 16 characters. Must have 4 numbers and 4 letters. Must not contain same letter or number in consecutive order. Can't contain vocal letters neither the letter Ñ. Password can't be the same as the previous 6 used.

Bank Millennium

Passwords limited to 8 digits.

Battle.net

8 to 16 characters, at least one number and one letter and last but not least NO special characters, and can't have a password that looks like your username too. Oh, and passwords are NOT case sensitive.

A real time travel adventure through the password rules of 2005!

BBVA

Username is your national ID (easy to find) and your password must have up to 6 alphanumeric characters only.

For a bank account with all your money in one of the largest financial institutions in the world.

BCV

Username is randomly generated, example: 'H2487414'. The password must have 6 digits only.

Password can only be changed from the mobile application:

BDO

Please nominate a password which contains UPPERCASE, lowercase, numbers and symbols. Password should not be the same as the user ID. Avoid using consecutive characters such (ex. abc, DEF, 678) and invalid characters such as [!#$%^&';"].

Bendigo Bank

Exactly eight characters.

Best Buy

You can enter whatever password you like! But you probably don't want to make it too long, because you'll break us and you'll never be able to login again.

BinckBank

Between 10 and 16 letters and/or digits. No special characters are allowed. Must be renewed at least every 180 days, but you can configure to let the password expire sooner. When changing the password, the new password cannot be too similar to the existing password.

Blackrock

They force you to enter a password that has 8, 9, or 10 characters, then they lecture you on how to create a strong password.

Bloomingdale's

16 characters maximum, no . , - | / = or _ allowed.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Massachusetts

16 maximum and no special characters. Protecting your US healthcare information.

BMO Bank of Montreal

Password requires at least one special character but disallows backtick `, backslash \, vertical bar |, and underscore _.

BMW ConnectedDrive

Although the prompt suggests good things, after many failed attempts to set a new password, it turns out you can ONLY use the special characters shown in the prompt

BOINC Bakerlab

Passwords may only include ASCII characters, not even extended ASCII.

Boligøen (Danish resident renting bureau)

Red text: "Your password has to be at least 6 characters, but NOT over 20 characters."

Boursorama

"To ensure the highest level of security, your password must have... 8 digits". And it must be entered using a funny keypad with the digits in the wrong order.

CAF (French Family Allowance Fund)

You have to enter your 8-digit password using this Frenchy keypad.

California Department of Motor Vehicles

They also prohibit pasting into the password field by using a JavaScript alert() whenever you right-click or press the Ctrl button, so you can't use a password manager.

Canada Revenue Agency

Password checklist:

8 to 16 charcacters
At least 1 upper-case character
At least 1 lower-case character
At least 1 digit
No space
No accented characters
No special characters except: dot (.), dash (-), underscore (_), and apostrophe (')
No more than 4 consequetive identical characters

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

Letters and numbers only, no symbols. Also an undocumented maximum of 12 characters!

Capital One

May only use the following characters: Aa-Zz 0-9 - _ . / \ @ $ * & ! #
No spaces

CENLAR

Your password can meet all the requirements in the list and still be invalid due to an unspecified rule: any "special characters" that are not listed in the help text are not allowed. Worse, it provides no useful feedback other than the "New Password" field is red.

CenturyLink

So many bad ideas: a low maximum length, requiring six specific character types while not accepting common symbols, plus a weird restriction that makes random generation harder.

CenturyLink Residential

Your password is too long. But how long can it be? Oh, we won't tell you.

Charles Sturt University

Prevents spaces and a set list of characters, limits to 30 characters and can only change your password twice per day.

Chase Bank

Can't use any special characters except ! # $ % + / = @ ~
Max length restriction (32 characters).
No runs of identical characters ("aaa") or sequential characters ("abc").
Password check is case-insensitive

Chegg

Here are the (only fairly poor) rules for a new password. Enter 64 character password that matches all the rules (notice no rules on maximum length). That password you entered looks good! But we didn't change it. And your old password doesn't work. Or the new one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cigna

A max of 12 characters... Can't handle most symbols (only 5 supported). At least they have two factor auth via email or sms * sigh *

Citi

Password is case-insensitive
Can't use ANY special characters (although, adding special characters increases the "password strength" meter?!)
Allows for a minimum password length of 6 characters
No runs of more than two identical characters (eg. "aaa" is not allowed.)
Does not allow you to paste passwords.

CloverSecurity

Password restricts quantity of characters "of same case", making correcthorsebatterystaple-style passwords problematic
No feedback for which rules are broken
Unlisted prohibited characters

Coil

Does not allow simple characters and sequences such as '4587' or 'efgh' in password & necessarily requires numeric values.

College Board

Password must be 9-30 characters with at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, one number and one special character (no spaces) and be different than your username.

Comcast

Your password should be difficult to guess as long as it's not over 16 characters long.

Commsec

Another financial institution with short password requirements. They also block pasting in to the field, making it a pain to use a password manager.

Copart

Copart: "The security of our members is extremely imporant to us."

Also Copart: "We're gonna need you to keep your password between 5-10 characters."

Copyright.gov

I wonder if they cooperate with NSA to enforce the password rules.

Costco.com

Due to Costco's short max password length of 16 characters, I strongly recommend using a password manager to make a random password to satisfy all of these conditions below:

Use between 8 and 16 characters
Include at least one lowercase (a-z) and one uppercase letter (A-Z)
Include at least one special character (e.g. !@#$&) - i.e., any symbol above the 0-9 keys)
Does not contain blank spaces or the following special characters: < > ,
Include at least one digit (0-9)

For the record, at least Costco.com has greatly improved after the summer of 2021 - before that, the site used to prohibit copying and pasting passwords, which prevented password managers from working properly. I believe the max password length was also longer before the summer of 2021 (either 20 or 32 characters), but I cannot confirm this since I never took a screenshot.

Coventry Building Society

Password has to be between 6 and 10 characters, can't contain any punctuation and you have to give characters from it on the phone to confirm identity.

Credit Agricole

Login is a predefined 11 digits long identifier that you can not change
Password is a 6 digits long identifier that you need to input using your mouse

Credit Union Australia (CUA) Health

Password must be between 7 and 10 characters, contain both an uppercase and a lowercase letter and have at least one number.

Crédit Agricole Centre-Est

You have to enter your 6-digit password using this Frenchy keypad.

CVent

Password Rules

8 to 20 characters with at least 1 number and 1 letter.
No symbols or spaces.

CWT Business Travel Management Company

Password: - 8 to 32 characters long - Must contain a combination of letters, numbers and symbols - Must be different from your username - Must be different from 5 previous passwords

Daybreak Games

Max password length is 15 characters The only special characters that can be used are !"#$%

DBS Bank (Singapore)

[[:digit:]]{6,8}

Dell

Okay at least 6, that's alright i guess. Oh at least one number and one letter, bit dumb but hey not that dumb.

But hiding the fact that it has a max of 20, now THAT is dumb!

Deloitte GlobalAdvantage

Rules that are completely arbitrary that basically make all safe passwords wrong, instead forcing pseudo-safe password combinations.

Delta

It's a good thing they don't store personal information such as your passport number... oh wait.

Discovery Benefits

Requires at least one symbol, but must be one of ! @ # $ % & * ?, and also has an unstated max length of 20 characters.

DJI

The symbol \ is banned without a notice, it'll probably escape whatever you'll put in, just why...

Dnevnik.ru

Silently (sic!) trim password to 30 symbols.

That causes the stupid case when you could successfully registrate an account with password length of 52 and can't login with the password.

Dutch Tax Authorities (Belastingdienst)

At least 8 and at most 25 characters, of which at least 3 of the characters were not used in the previous password. No more than 3 of the same characters. At least 1 upper case and 4 lower case characters. No more than 3 special characters.

It's not like hashing passwords is a thing or something.

Dwr Cymru (Welsh Water)

Limits password length to a maximum of 16 characters

E-learning (Unipd)

Exactly 8 characters for password! There must be at least 1 lowercase letter, at least 1 uppercase letter, at least 1 number and at least 1 special char ( * , . $ # @ etc...).

$e-learning (Unipd)$

E-Trade

Causes:

Your two-factor authentication code must be appended to the end of the password
Passwords have a limit of 32 characters

Effect: If your account has a 32-character password and has two-factor authentication, their system appears to cut off the token, making it impossible to login. You must reduce your password to 26 characters in order to login with a token.

Easybank (Austrian direct bank)

At least 8 and at most 16 (!) characters
Must start with 5 digits (do we really want to know what's going on there?)
At least one uppercase and one lowercase letter
(Some) special characters are permitted, most are not
"Simple" patterns are prohibited
PINs are case sensitive (at least it's something)

Easyjet

No more than 20 characters, use any symbols you like... Oh except #, &, +, or space of course.

El Corte Ingles

Min 6 and max 8 characters for password! Can't contain anything different than letters and numbers. Apart, the email address must have at least 8 characters (sorry million dollar domain owners! :D)

Electronic Arts (EA)

Your password must be 8 - 16 characters, and include at least one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter, and a number.

EllieMae Access

Must reset password every 6 months and password requirements are not displayed _anywhere_. Reset uses a Security Question, and you have to choose from a list of 5.

Entwickler.de

Your password must be 12-20 characters.

EON

By the time I'd finished reading the rules I've forgotten all of them.

Equifax - The Work Number

Eight to sixteen characters, numeric digits only, not the same as the User ID.

Number of permutations: 1E+16
Number of permutations for the weakest length: 1E+8
vs permutations for a 8-16 password using standard characters: 4E+31
vs permutations for the weakest length of 8 using standard characters: 7E+15
Other issues: allows and encourages the use of sequences like "12345678", SSN, DOB, today's date
At stake: last 4 digits of SSN, current and past addresses, and detailed work history of millions of Americans, down to how much their paycheck was in the third week of September 2007
Past security screwups by this company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#Security_Failings

Eurocircuits

Minimum 4 and maximum 30 chars. Use only letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and underscore (_)

FACE IT Ltd. (Faceit)

Your password must be 6 - 20 characters. No special characters or numbers required.

Fidelity

No more than 20 characters and leave out characters commonly used by programmers. We don't want you to hack the mainframe.

Fidelity National Information Services

White label online banking provider. Typically appears as BANK.ibanking-services.com or BANK.ebanking-services.com. If your small local bank has a crappy online banking experience, these guys probably provide it.

\<>' and spaces prohibited, upper bound. Passwords of exactly the maximum length are truncated by one character. Unlisted prohibited characters.

Freepik

Has to be between 6 and 30 characters, needs to have a number, letter, capital letter, symbol BUT no whitespaces.

Fundatec

Must be exactly 6 alphanumeric characters, does not show special characters are not allowed, username is your social security number (easily searchable) and the form is sent over plain HTTP. Did I mention this company applies college entrance exams for Computer Science nationwide in Brazil?

Gebührenfrei MasterCard

The new password can only have 6-12 characters. It may contain letters, numbers and a fixed set of special characters.

Getin Bank

The new password should contain at least 10 and a maximum of 20 characters. The password must contain at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter and one number. The password cannot contain non-ASCII Polish alphabet characters, special characters &<'" or spaces.

Global Entry

"Our duties are wide-ranging, and our goal is clear - keeping America safe."

GoDaddy

Some characters are too special.

GoDaddy SFTP

Max 14 characters for the most important password in your shared hosting environment.

GoFundMe

At least one uppercase and one lowercase letter
At least one number and one special symbol
Does not specify which characters are considered special symbols; did not recognize spaces as special symbols

Green Flag

8 to 10 characters
No special characters

Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (UK Tax)

We store basically all of your data, but we can't store your password.

Hetzner

8 or more characters
At least one uppercase and one lowercase letter
At least one number or special character

Okay, fair enough, but after putting in a password with some special characters this message appears:

Invalid characters, allowed are: A-Z a-z 0-9 ä ö ü ß Ä Ö Ü ^ ! $ % / ( ) = ? + # - . , ; : ~ * @ [ ] { } _ ° §

You can't use &<>'"\|´`, spaces and any other non-ascii character.

HSA Bank

Must be minimum 12 characters
Must not be one of user's past 5 passwords
Must contain uppercase and lowercase letters
Must contain a number
Must not be the same as user's account number or login/username

But also...

Cannot be longer than 20 characters

IBM

Password cannot be longer then 31 characters. Spaces, ?, ../, curly braces and double byte character not allowed

IBM TSO/E Logon terminal

It might not be a web site, but that does not make it less dumb. Since many don't know about IBM mainframes, it seems they don't think you need to up the policies.

Default old password policy is: 6-8 characters long, A-Z, 0-9

Over the last few years they have updated their policies a bit, but due to many of their subsystems are incompatible, they can't enforce the new options for safer passwords.

ICAgile

Observed on November 17, 2020:

Password must contain:

8-15 total characters
At least one lowercase letter
At least one uppercase letter
At least one number
At least one special character (e.g., !#$%^*)

They don't seem to have a public registration form. You receive a registration link after completing a course with one of their accredited providers.

IHG

4, yes 4, digits only.

ING a dutch bank in almost 50 countries

Max 20 characters, must have one number, one upper case character and one lower case character. You can only use certain special characters. When i asked about it they answer that it's really hard to change it. When i asked if the password is saved as a hash or just plain they send the answer to the technical department this was march 2018.

ING Australia

4 numeric digits. "Added security" by randomising the positions on the keypad. Must be clicked.

ING Romania's Internet Banking Portal

No more, no less than 5 digits. This is the password you use to log in and to confirm online transactions. They used to have "normal" passwords and they forced everybody to change to the 5 digits versions. They said they've made it "so it's easier for you" and it's OK, because everybody has 2FA.

Inpost

Allows between 8 to 16 characters. Password is being used to log in and view packages sent to you, or for shipping packages.

Inria

This is the account for those who work at Inria <https://www.inria.fr/> "the French national research institute for the digital sciences".

You have to wonder what's wrong with these special characters but not the other ones.

Password expiration once a year
Your password must contain at least 8 characters.
Your password can't be a commonly used password.
Your password can't be entirely numeric.
Your password cannot contain non ascii chars
Your password cannot contain ^ " ' space ; /
Your password must contain at least 2 punctuation
Your password must contain at least 1 uppercase
Your password must contain at least 1 lowercase
Your password cannot contain your login (or substring of login)
Your password cannot contain your last name (or substring of last name)
Your password cannot contain your first name (or substring of first name)

INSS (Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social)

The National Social Security Institute (INSS) is an autarchy of the Government of Brazil linked to the Ministry of Economy that receives the contributions for the maintenance of the General Social Security System, responsible for the payment of pensions, maternity pay, death pay, sickness pay, accident pay, seclusion pay and other benefits for those who acquire the right to these benefits as provided by law. The INSS works with Dataprev, a technology company that processes all Social Security data. But:

Special characters is not required
Exact 9 digits
At least 1 lowercase, 1 uppercase letter and a 1 number

Intel

Interactive Brokers

Usual dumb password restrictions, but this one has incredibly dumb username restrictions too:

Username:

Length of 8 or 9 letters and numbers
Contain at least 3 letters and 3 numbers
Begin with a letter
Lower case only, no spaces, no special characters

Password:

Cannot match username
Length of 8 to 40 characters
Contain at least 1 letter
Contain at least 1 number
Case sensitive, no spaces, no special characters

Irodoricomics

A website to buy english-localized doujins. The password must be between 4 and 20 characters long

IRS

Password rules:

Between 8 and 32 characters long
Must contain at least one numeric and one special character (!@#$%&*)
At least one uppercase and at least one lowercase letter

Izly by Crous

Izly by Crous is an imposed French payment service for the university. You can't pay your daily meal without that because yeah you know cash is an ancient dumb thing.

Your username is firstname.lastname@youruniversity.fr or your phone number. We only allow you a fixed 6 numbers password. Oh yeah we also block your account after three failed atempts. How convenient when the only thing you need to know is the name of someone and where they study. How convenient indeed.

Oh and also look we got pages NOT TRANSLATED IN FRENCH because duh.

Jitterbit

While not the dumbest password rule, still dumb.

Password must have a length of at least eight characters and contain at least one: number, special char !#$%-_=+<>, capital letter, and lowercase letter.

Keimyung University

Okay, doesn't looks that hard... But wait, there are hidden rules!

Hidden rules: your password can't have 3 times the same character in a row or more than 2 consecutive numbers. Also if your password is 20 characters or more you won't be able to write it in the mobile app.

Kryterion Webassessor

I was quite suprised to see this when I was registering for my Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification. Nice part is that they don't allow quotes as special character, so I assume there possibly might be some other issues on their backends. :-)

La Banque Postale

Password must be 6 digits and entered on custom pad.

LCL

You have to enter your 6-digit password using this Frenchy keypad.

Liberty Mutual

Must not contain spaces or the following characters: @/*%<&+>

LibraryThing

"Your password cannot be longer than 20 characters"

Lloyds Bank

Max 15 characters, min 8. You cannot use ANY special characters - alpha-numerics only. This amazingly terrible password policy combines with a known phrase (The "Memorable Information") of which you will be asked for a random 3 characters of if you get your password right. This phrase has similar alpha-numeric restrictions applied.

Lowes

Be 8 to 12 characters in length
Include at least 1 letter and 1 number
Contain no spaces
Contain no more than 3 of the same consecutive characters

Lufthansa

minimum of 8 character(s)
minimum of 1 lowercase letter(s)
minimum of 1 uppercase letter(s)
minimum of 1 number(s)
minimum of 1 special character (s)!"$%&()*+,-./:;#<>?_@\
does not match the Username
Not used before, not easy to guess

M and M Direct

Maximum length of 24 characters
Cannot contain special characters, eg. ! # $ " @

Major League Baseball

When creating a new account they enforce some password rules like: length must be between 8 and 15 characters and there must be one upper case, one lower case letter and one number.

MarketWatch

Cannot be longer than 15 characters.
Must contain one number.
Cannot contain spaces, %, & or +.

Maxpreps

Natalie Weiner: can't sign in because her's lastname is offensive language for the website

ME Bank

Must be all numerals.
Be 7 to 20 digits.
Cannot have the same number three times in a row.
Cannot have four ascending or descending numbers.
Cannot have the same number appear more than five times.
Cannot have pairs next to each other if the second pair is one number higher.
Cannot be the same as 8 previous ones.

Merrill Lynch

Passwords must be between 8 and 20 characters, and some special characters are allowed. Users with randomly-generated passwords may find it particularly annoying to generate a password that works for their password safe.

MetLife

Max length of 20 characters, no special characters allowed. Pasting into the second password field is disabled even with the Chrome extension Don't Fuck With Paste.

Microsoft (e company store)

Max of 16 character oh and please don't use any characters we don'y know how to escape properly also if it starts with ? you may break our wonderful website. What out with your password generator duplicated charaters is far too insecure to allow here.

Microsoft (work accounts)

What doesn't seem to be a problem for personal accounts, is for work accounts from Microsoft (e.g. Office 365 etc.).

Maximum 16 characters. So forget about using your new fancy diceware password here - or really any secure passwords in general.

Oh - and besides that, please don't use any "exotic" symbols, like ¤ or €. Or the letters Æ, Ø or Å from the Danish alphabet. They all are supposedly "spaces".

Mindware

You "may use special characters", but only some of them - and we won't necessarily tell you which ones.

Minecraft

Using a 16 character password seems to work. Everything else above does not always work. Also, passwords that are too long are still changed, so you have to reset them by email.

Minnesota Unemployment Insurance

Locked to exactly 6 chars, alphanumeric only, not special chars.

MKB NetBankár

It only accepts lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numbers (any other character counts as forbidden character).

Also, if your password contains any invalid character, it will get marked as "Identical to the former 10 passwords".

To make it more fun, during the registration, it allows to set a 24 characters password to login to their website.

Once you try to login with the password, it will say that the maximum length accepted is 16 characters.

What actually happens, is that they let you insert 24 characters during registration, but only the first 16 will get actually used as password.

Mobi Bike Share

Your PIN (which is the password you use to login, which lets you, say, buy hundreds of dollars worth of bike-share subscriptions off the saved credit card) must be four numeric digits. Helpfully, they even give you an example of a PIN: 1234.

MobileIron MDM

You can't make this up - no dictionary words, no more than 2 repeating characters, no alphabetic sequences, no whitespace, 3 character sets, maximum of 32 characters.

Mobility

The username is the customer number, which is sequential and cannot be changed, currently 7 digits long for new customers.

The password has to be exactly 6 digits long, only numbers allowed.

Movistar

Min 7 and max 8 characters for password! Also to be different than the username: the user name is automatically generated and is based on the surname of the user with some characters replaced by digits :)

Has been that way for more than 10 years.

My Prepaid Center

Only six legal special characters; maximum password length is 20 characters.

Mycanal

Minimum of 8 characters
Contain at least 1 uppercase character or 1 number
Can not contain these characters : ‹ › ' "

MySwissLife

User ID has to be 8 characters exactly, password has to be 8 characters and numbers only.

NASA Earth Data

Username must:

Be a Minimum of 4 characters
Be a Maximum of 30 characters
Use letters, numbers, periods, and underscores
Not contain any blank spaces
Not begin, end or contain two consecutive special characters(._)

Password must contain:

Minimum of 8 characters
One Uppercase letter
One Lowercase letter
One Number

NBA Store

Password cannot be longer than 20 characters

NBank

User ID has to contain special characters, password may not contain (basically) any special characters.

NBC (National Bank of Canada)

Password length must be 8 to 25 characters
Password must contain at least one lower letter (any position)
Password must contain at least one digit (any position)
Password cannot contain spaces.
Copy/paste is not allowed when trying to set a new password

Nectar API

The Nectar website allows strong passwords. However, when trying to link my Sainsbury's account, I found the API has different ideas...

Password field length capped to 16 characters

Netflix

The help page and the password reset page say:

Ihr Passwort muss zwischen 4 und 60 Zeichen lang sein und darf keine Tilde (~) enthalten.

Disallowing a 64-bit hex password, as generated by KeePass, ist unnecessarily restrictive.

There is no apparent reason for disallowing the tilde but allowing all other special characters. Luckily, that rule is not enforced at all. It seems to be only written down to irritate customers.

Nevada DMV

Password length must be exactly 8 characters in length
Password must contain at least one letter (any position)
Password must contain at least one number (any position)
Password must contain one of the following special characters: @ # $
Password is not case sensitive

NordVPN

Password cannot be longer than 48 characters.

NVV (Nordhessische VerkehrsVerbund)

Password length must be 4 to 10 characters with only a few special characters allowed.

O2 Spain

When registering in Mi O2 app, password length must be exactly 7 or 8 characters (numbers and letters only). As O2 is part of Telefónica (Movistar), it seems to use the same backend (at least in Spain), so it has the same password requirements.

Omnivox

Password length must be 8 to 20 characters long with lower case characters and numbers only.

Onleihe

Password is your birthday in format ddmmyyyy. Users are not allowed to change their passwords

Oracle

Should not or must not? RFC 2119 may want a word with you.

Origin

Password must be between 8 and 16 characters long

PagoMisCuentas

Password must be between 8 and 15 alphanumeric characters, and have at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter.

Parnassus Investments

A site responsible for protecting your investments limiting you to a four character range with a bunch of other stupid rules? Shocking.

Parsec

A service for screen sharing and enabling online multiplayer gaming, when the software itself only supports offline multiplayer.

PayPal

Must be between 8 and 20 characters, no spaces, uppercase and lowercase, one symbol...

The rule limits special characters to !@#$%^&*(). but my current password has a "-" in it so someone decided to restrict this further which is totally backwards. Things are meant to get better not worse!

Paytm

Password must be between 5 and 15 characters. Also, spaces don't count as characters.

PCPartPicker

There are no rules for passwords. Passwords can be any length (including one character) of any complexity. No password change confirmation emails are sent.

PizzaHut

Passwords must be greater than 6 characters, and have an arbitrary set of rules we don't tell you about until after you try to set your password.

Pole-Emploi

Password must contain at least one letter, one number and one character from &-_@*%=.,;:!? only. It rejected passwords generated by pass, while accepting p@ssw0rd!... They also block pasting on the password confirmation field, forcing you to manually type your 32-letters-long generated password.

Polytechnique Montreal

Passwords must have a minimum length of 8 characters Passwords must have a maximum length of 30 characters Passwords must contain a minimum of 2 digits Passwords must contain a minimum of 2 letters Password must be different than the last one used Passwords may contain these special characters (! & % $)

Premera Blue Cross

Password must contain 8-30 characters, including one letter and one number. "Special characters allowed" seems to mean a very small handful of choices you can only find through trial and error -_'.@

Progressive Home by Homesite

Password must be a minimum of 8 characters. Passwords must have one lowercase character. Passwords must have one uppercase character. Passwords must have one number. Passwords must have one special character in the following list: !'#$ ~`!@#$%^&*()-_+=?<,>.{}[]|;:

Furthermore, when resetting your password using this URL, it allows for up to 20 (i haven't tested past this) characters.

https://progressivedirect.homesite.com/OnlineServicing/Welcome.aspx#RecoverPassword/CreateNewPassword

However, when you log in, it only allows passwords up to 12 characters in length. So that newly created password will work once and only once.

Raiffeisen Bank Serbia

There are a couple of password limitations when creating a new account (and changing existing password) on Raiffeisen Bank Serbia on-line banking portal. Password length is limited to minimum 8 and maximum 16 characters. Also, minimum uppercase letters 1, minimum lowercase letter 1, minimum digits 2, maximum consecutive identical characters 4 and first character must be a letter. Oh... And, no special characters!

Image shows the password update screen, but the requirements are the same for account creation.

Red Hat

Symbols. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Rediff

A maximum password length of 12. The hidden requirements are:

atleast 1 uppercase letter
atleast 1 lowercase letter
atleast 1 numeric character
atleast 1 special symbol (which can not be ^, %)

Replit

Forces to use minimum 8 characters in the password and it must contain atleast one uppercase.

Return of Reckoning

Password must be between 6 and 100 characters. It doesn't say on the website, but the password only works in the related game client if it is purely alphanumeric. Not even special characters like % or $ are allowed.

Rogers

I can only use 4 special characters?

Password guidelines

Your password should be between 8-20 characters and have at least one number and one letter.
The following special characters are allowed: ! @ # $

Roll 20

Your new password must be at least 4 characters long and no longer than 40 characters. Your password was not changed.

Runescape

A minimum password length of 5, and maximum password length of 20. Does not tell you that your password is NOT case sensitive. Hidden requirements: Alphanumeric only, no symbols, no repeated characters.

Rushmore Loan Management Services

Hmmm.. why are they afraid of double and single quotes in my passwords?

Safeway

Passwords limited to 8-12 characters.

SAP Cloud Appliance Library

Passwords between 8 and 9 characters are the best.

Saturn

Passwords need to be between 8 and 15 characters.

Scandinavian Airlines

The password rules itself is fine, but, it doesn't inform about the max length of the password. Their max length is 14 characters, so even if you enter a password of 42 chars, you can login with the first 14 of it. In this case, I changed my password to Super_l0ng_password_that_fits_all_criteria, and could login with Super_l0ng_pas

Answer form SAS customer service:

> Hi,
> Thank you for your e-mail.
> Our website only takes 14 characters as a password, so somehow when you registered > it took all 49.
> But since our website only asks for 14 characters anything after will be valid.
> I would advice you to change your password.
> Have a wonderful day.

Sears

"cAsE sensitive, no spaces, ! or ? 8 characters min - 1 letter, 1 number Can't repeat same character more than 3 times in a row Cannot be or contain your username or email address"

SecureAccess Washington

Central authentication for all Washington State services (DoL, ESD, etc).

Password must have exactly 10 characters, but form happily lets you enter more and only throws errors after submit, providing no useful feedback.

Seur

Password must be between 8 and 12 characters... Also no symbols are allowed. But this isn't displayed.

Sharekhan

At least 8 characters.
At most 12 characters.

SielteID

Sielte is one of the four Italian digital identity providers of level 3 (the highest available).

The rules are as such:

At least 8 characters
At most 16 characters
Must have both lower and upper characters
Must have one or more digits and one or more of the following "special characters": ~!@#$%^&*()_-+={}[]|:;"'<>,.?/-
Must not have more than two identical consecutive characters

Italian vowels with accents are considered to be invalid.

Both the old and the new password are sent to the server without beign hashed first. Validation happens on the server side only.

Singapore Airlines

/[0-9]{6}/

Sky Ticket

Sky is a german pay-TV provider with over 23 million subscribed users worldwide. They also have an online streaming service called "Sky Ticket".

You can only set a 4 digit long PIN with no option for two-factor authentication or any additional security mechanisms.

Slovenska sporitelna

Slovenska sporitelna is the biggest bank in Slovakia. Despite pretty new version of the internet banking (rolled out in 2018), their password policy restricts password to be 16 characters long at most and prohibits any special characters.

Southwest

Password must be between 8 and 16 characters in length and include at least one uppercase letter and one number. Certain special characters are also allowed, but the first character of the password must be alphanumeric.

Sparda-Bank

Sparda is a group of German banks. They all use the same login form (except for Sparda-Bank Berlin, see below). Their equivalent of a password is called Online-PIN. As the name implies, only digits are allowed. (Zifferneingabe means "digit input"; it opens an on-screen number pad widget.)

Not mentioned explicitly: Your PIN is limited to 6 characters, i.e. the range of valid "passwords" is from 000000 to 999999.

The odd one out is Sparda-Bank Berlin, which has different rules:

At least 8 characters.
At most 20 characters.
Only the following characters are allowed: a-z, A-Z, ä/Ä, ö/Ö, ü/Ü, ß, 0-9, and the "special characters" @!%&/=?*+;:,._-.
Your password must use either digits only (like a PIN) or at least one digit and at least one uppercase letter.

Sparkasse

„Sparkasse“ is a group of banks which is pretty popular in Germany. It calls its passwords „PIN“ („persönliche Identifikations-Nummer“ — personal identification number), the rules are pretty horrific and its not even a number, even though it is called as such! Here is a screenshot from the branch where I am from (Jena, Germany), but since they have a central IT, I think it will be identical in other branches:

The rules are as such:

Only 5 characters
Small letters (a-z)
Large letters (A-Z)
Numbers (0-9)
„Special“ characters: ä,ö,ü,Ä,Ö,Ü and ß (Not suprising for a german Company)

After the rules there some hints on how the password should not look like:

Combinations of your initials and the birthyear
Your phone number or parts thereof
Your zipcode
Commom combinations like 123ab or 55555
Full or parts of your login credentials

They also have this Android app for 2FA (called Push-TAN), but the rules are diffrent:

At least 8 characters
At least one digit
At least one special character
Upper- and lowercase letters

Sprint

Sprint "upgraded" their security and disallow special characters.

Standard Chartered Bank

Between 8 to 16 characters
Only letters and/or numbers

State Bank of India (Foreign Travel Card)

State Bank of India is the largest government operated bank in India. They offer "travel" prepaid cards for foreign currencies, this is for their portal for the prepaid card users to manage their account.

Your password must:

Be between 8 and 9 characters long
Contain at least 1 lowercase character
Contain at least 1 uppercase character
Contain at least 1 special character
Contain at least 1 number
NOT contain any "hacking characters" - #, %, &, =, /, <

SunLife

8 to 10 characters
At least 1 letter and 1 number
No spaces, symbols, or accents

SunTrust

At least there are a variety of special characters to choose from.

Synchrony Financial

Financial services - where we don't allow you to create the strongest password possible.

T-Mobile

We prefer to not tell you which characters you can use up front.

Taco Bell

Password may include special characters, except for #.

Taiwan Pingtung University

Password must:

Be between 8 ~ 15 characters long.
- Exceeding 15 will result in an account lockout instead of
erroring on submit. Otherwise, the max character length should be 20.
Contains at least 1 number character
Contains at least 1 lowercase character
Contains at least 1 uppercase character
NOT contain any special character
- This rule is not listed on the official page; however,
attempting to use a special character will result in an exception.

Tangerine

Your PIN can only contain numbers and must be between 4 and 6 numbers.

Targobank

Your password must:

must not be your username
must at least eight characters
must contain at least one number character
must contain at least one uppercase character and 1 lowercase character
must not contain spaces
must not contain three identical characters in a row
must not contain three consecutive characters
must not contain special characters or umlauts

Techcombank

Your password must:

Be between 6 and 8 characters long
Contains at least 1 number character
Contains at least 1 lowercase character
Contains at least 1 uppercase character
Neither space nor unicode character is allowed. In fact, NO special characters is allowed
Must be changed every 90 days

Telcel

The username is the cell phone number (easy to get)
The company creates a password between 8 and 12 characters for you
Password must contain at least 1 capital letter and no special characters

Telekom/T-Systems MyWorkplace

Telekom's MyWorkplace is a Single Sign On / login hub for their Open Telekom Cloud which is basically an Amazon AWS clone. It's rather new and especially for business customers. Especially because it is for business customers, there's absolutely no reason to limit a password to 16 characters. Even special characters are limited to a certain set.

Testprep Training

The max password size is 20 characters

Thames Water

Can only use the "special" characters on that very limited list, excluding symbols so exotic as an underscore, even. This is despite their own strength checker saying the password is strong.

Three

Password must be at least 7 characters long. The maximum length is inconsistent, however: when changing password, the maximum length is 30, but when resetting password via email link, the maximum length is 12.

Ticketmaster.de

Your password length is limited between 8 and 32 characters.

Trade Me

Won't allow spaces or single quotes. Maybe other characters as well - they do not say up front - but the password they accepted contained lots of other special characters.

TreasuryDirect

Will allow most passwords longer than 8 characters. Doesn't tell you there is a maximum length of 16 characters. Then forces you to type it with an on-screen keyboard with no capital letters.

Twilio

Restriction in inclusion of characters such as 'Twilio' in password. Password must be 16 or more characters & Can't include 3 or more consecutive repeated characters.

TwinSpires

You can gamble on our site. We'll keep your money secure with a 12 character password!

Ubisoft

Only tells you the rules after submitting and clicking a link to a pop up window.

Unicaja

Username is your national Spanish ID (easy to find). Your password must be 6 characters long. You can't type, only select characters from the virtual keyboard

UniSuper

Passwords need:

a lower case letter
a number
a capital letter
at least 8 characters

In the 'Change password' form, passwords are now restricted to a maxlength of 18.

If your current password is longer than 18 characters, you won't be able to change your password. When I contacted them about this, they "passed on" my "experience and concerns" for review and simply reset my password.

Now I wish I'd just said nothing and kept my 50-character password.

United Parcel Service of America

Your password must:

Be between 7 and 26 characters long
Contain at least 1 lowercase character
Contain at least 1 uppercase character
Contain at least 1 number character
Contain one special character (!@#$%*)
NOT contain first or last name
NOT contain UPS user ID
NOT contain email address

United States Postal Service

Pick from an arbitrary list of symbols, and no repeating characters.

University of California San Diego

Passwords must be between 8 and 11 characters long!

University of Texas at Austin

Because of the last two rules, which ban dictionary words and any variants using symbol substitutions, neither of the passwords presented in the xkcd comic are allowed.

University of Western Australia (Pheme)

Passwords:

Must contain at least 8 characters;
Must contain at least 3 out of 4 types of characters (uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, special characters); and
Must not contain "the user's account name or parts of the user's full name that exceed two consecutive characters".

New passwords are silently truncated to 30 characters. Inspecting the change password input field reveals a maxlength="30" attribute, but this isn't obvious to the average user because the field isn't physically wide enough to see the truncation. There is no warning or error message.

If you subsequently try to login with the untruncated password, it doesn't work because the password input field on the login page doesn't have a maxlength="30" attribute (and neither does the input field for Outlook email).

Passwords must be changed every 6 months.

University of Windsor

The password policy applies to alumni as well. Must be at least 10 characters long, with at least 1 upper case and 1 lower case character, at least 1 number, at least 1 special character. Password expires every 120 days, and you can't reuse an old one.

URSSAF (French employers tax collection service)

When setting a new password: Password must be exactly 8 characters, at least 1 letter, at least 1 number, but no special characters.

USAA Bank

Password cannot be longer than 12 characters but they don't tell you that until after you try a new password. To make up for this fact they've added dubious additional security features on top of this weak foundation.

Vancity Credit Union

Personal Access Code (or PAC–they are too ashamed to call it a password), must be between 5 to 8 digits and cannot start with '0'. (no letters or symbols)

Very.co.uk

Password field allows only the listed Special Characters ($ . , ! % ^ *). You're also forced to use both upper, and lower letters, as well as a number.

Vietnam Airlines

[[:alnum:]]{6,8}

Vio Bank

The password requirement is not even fully enumerated. Upon inspection of the source code, the following lines were found, hidden by javascript: "Must include at least %MINSPECIAL of the following characters:-.~!@#&_{}|:$%^*()=[];?/+"

The actual list of special characters that are prohibited is correctly enumerated there. It's a result of a misapplication of the variable allowedSpecialCharacters found here.

It took under 5 minutes to find the bug after looking at the source for the first time. This is a bank.

Vip Mobile Serbia

Vip mobile Serbia is a mobile provider in Serbia that imposes poor password rules.

Translation: "Length of the password must be between 8 and 20 characters and can only have letters and digits."

Virgin Media

Your password needs to be between 8 and 10 characters long, with no spaces, and must contain only numbers and letters. The first character must be a letter.

Feb 2020 Update: policy remains the same but the description is hidden leaving you to guess the acceptable length/chars. Users are now left with helpful hints after JS validation.

Virgin Mobile

You can only use PIN as your password.

Virgin Trains

Your password needs to be between 8 and 10 characters long. Previously this would silently truncate the password without warning, causing confusion when the password wouldn't work.

Wageworks

In addition to the following rules regarding passwords...

8-20 characters in length
Include at least 4 of the following: lowercase letter, uppercase letter, number AND symbol
Not include your last name, first name or space

Your new password should be different from your previous twenty passwords.

Ok. Password21!, it is.

Walmart

Your password must include the following:

8–100 characters
Upper & lowercase letters
At least one number or special character

Waze

After you request a password reset and you receive an email with instructions and link to reset your password, you are presented with this password reset form. Your password length is limited between 8 and 16 characters. Additionally the form breaks with an error if you use any special characters. The form does not mention anything about special characters. Waze is owned by Google.

Dumb Password Rules

Contributing

Sites

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