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> There is a special place in hell for anyone who creates a maximum password length limit

People abuse everything, you can be dossed trying to compute <pick your hashing algorithm-of-choice> of a password as big as the maximum body size your webserver accept (which is a limit btw, so remember to dress light :-p )



Don't tell me that if you allow long passwords you'll run into the body size limit of the http server when you set the maximum password length to a measly 16 bytes because your choice of password hash scales like O(length(password)*iterations) which opens you up to a denial of service if you allow longer passwords. 50, 100, even 200 byte passphrases are reasonable and make no discernible performance difference to sanely designed auth servers.

There's no reason* why the time a hashing algorithm takes to do security rounds should vary with the length of the user's password. If you want to prevent DoS as GP mentioned then run all passwords through one round of a (fast) secure hash algorithm, then do security rounds with the output. This is what Argon2 does by default https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon2


bcrypt has a built-in 72 byte limit, which helps with the DOS issue




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