263307 - Password quality meter too brainless

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, defect)

Description

[Bert Dobbelaere]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

The password quality meter judging the master password overlooks trivial weaknesses.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Tools->Options->Privacy->Saved Passwords (expand it)
2. "Set Master Password"
3. See the password quality meter's response while you type
    a)  "---000"    or
    b)  "wfgerkfgnmifdhgslkfjhgimp"   or
    c)  "AAAAA"


Actual Results:  
Password quality of the silly password "---000" is outstanding, while
"wfgerkfgnmifdhgslkfjhgimp" scores very poor. Even "AAAAA" is getting pretty
high marks, while "AAA!!!" is again perfect.

Expected Results:  
I understand that humans will allways find tricks to let the quality meter be
optimistic for 'guessable' passwords and vice versa, but some small extra checks
can for sure improve the scoring:
1) Using the number of *different* characters as an additional limiting metric
   (it's evident that a password based on a set of 1 or 2 characters
    must be weak)
2) Using uppercase characters is only rewarded when lowercases are present
   and the first letter is not the only uppercase, so
       "Elephant", "elephant" and "ELEPHANT" score the same,
       while "eLEphant" is better. 


Also applies to Thunderbird (SW security device)

Comment 1

[jcf129]

needs more details

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.