Long Passwords

Someone trying to break into your account will often try common passwords first. A password like coffee is easy to guess, and adding ! doesn't help much.

Instead, you can use several randomly chosen words, like otter-lamp-river-bicycle. This is called a passphrase. It gives you a longer password without having to remember a jumble of letters and numbers.

At Lumen, you can set a minimum password length for everyone. First, check the current rule:

seclab policy

Look for these lines:

Password policy:
  minimum length: 8

The minimum is currently eight characters. To find out who needs a longer password, start by listing the accounts:

seclab people

Look for these lines:

user   role              status  left on  mfa
lee    developer         active           off

Then use a username from that list to read the person's details. For Lee, run:

seclab people lee

Look for these lines:

lee: Lee Park, developer
  password: 16 characters

Lee's password has sixteen characters. Suppose the company now wants at least eighteen. Set the new minimum:

seclab policy set min-length 18

You should see:

Policy updated: min-length is 18.

This changes the rule for new passwords, but Lee still has the old one. Reset his password so the replacement follows the new rule:

seclab reset lee

You should see:

Password reset for lee. Every session they had is signed out.