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Awesome rant.

In my mind, someone (browser vendors? security community?) should create a standard for handling interactions to do with passwords. Covering password length, characters allowed, characters required, case sensitivity, et cetera. Or perhaps a grading mechanism. Give it a catchy name and get some noted security researchers and clueful businesses to endorse it. You could even have a browser extension which points out to users which sites are handling passwords poorly or in an inconvenient way.

With respect to the issues with banking institutions: why not take it up with your congressperson, or write to the FTC and/or SEC? The FTC is charged with consumer protection, and this seems directly in line with that. Again, if there was a grading tool, the regulators could apply that.



Mozilla was working on a solution to this some time ago (back when Aza was still with Mozilla, early 2010 is the latest date in the linked design doc): http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-fire...

From the document he links to it seems more like a fancy password manager that handles session cookies too with the idea of standardizing account management. Not necessarily a lofty vision but certainly something helpful and interesting (albeit seemingly dead now).


The work you point to has morphed into the BrowserID effort: https://browserid.org/ . Currently alive and well.




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