NJ Courts Impose Ridiculous Password Policy 'To Comply With NIST' That Does Exactly What NIST Says Not To Do

from the the-poor-online-security-guardin'-state dept

As a New Jersey native I know how tempting it is for people to gratuitously bash my home state. But, you know, sometimes it really does have it coming.

In this case it's because of the recent announcement of a new password policy for all of the New Jersey courts' online systems – ranging from e-filing systems for the courts to the online attorney registration system – that will now require passwords to be changed every 90 days.

This notice is to advise that the New Jersey Judiciary is implementing an additional information security measure for those individuals who use Judiciary web-based applications, in particular, attorney registration, eCourts, eCDR, eTRO, eJOC, eVNF, EM, MACS, and DVCR. The new security requirement - password synchronization or p-:-synch - will require users to electronically reset their passwords every 90 days.

For reasons explained below, this new policy is a terrible idea. But what makes it particularly risible is that the New Jersey judiciary is claiming this change is being implemented in order to comply with NIST.

This requirement is being added to ensure that our systems and data are protected and secure consistent with industry security standards (National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF)).

The first problem here, of course, is that this general allusion to NIST is not helpful. If NIST has something specific to say that the courts are relying on, then the courts should specially say what it is. Courts would never accept these sorts of vague hand-wavy references to authority in matters before them. Assertions always require a citation to the support upon which they are predicated so that they can be reviewed for accuracy and reasonableness. Instead the New Jersey judiciary here expects us to presume this new policy is both, when in fact it is neither.

The reality is that the NIST Cybersecurity Framework does not even mention the word "password," let alone any sort of 90-day expiration requirement. Moreover, what NIST does actually say about passwords is that they should not be made to expire. In particular, the New Jersey judiciary should direct its attention to Special Publication 800-63B, which expressly says:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically).

That same section of the Special Publication also says that, "Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets" because, as a NIST study noted, it tends to reduce overall security hygiene. Guess what else the new New Jersey password policy does:

Users must select passwords that are no more than eight (8) characters long and contain at least one capital letter, one lower case letter, one numeral, and one of the enumerated special characters.

It also gets worse, because as part of this password protocol it will require security questions in order to recover lost passwords.

Additionally, this policy change will require that each user choose and answer three personal security questions that will later allow the user to reset their own password should their account become disabled, for example, because of an expired password. The answers to the three security questions should be kept confidential in order to reduce the risk of unauthorized access and allow for most password resets to be done electronically.

Security questions are themselves a questionable security practice because they are often built around information that, especially in a world of ubiquitous social media, may not be private.

From their dangerous guessability to the difficulty of changing them after a major breach like Yahoo's, security questions have proven to be deeply inadequate as contingency mechanisms for passwords. They're meant to be a reliable last-ditch recovery feature: Even if you forget a complicated password, the thinking goes, you won't forget your mother's maiden name or the city you were born in. But by relying on factual data that was never meant to be kept secret in the first place—web and social media searches can often reveal where someone grew up or what the make of their first car was—the approach puts accounts at risk. And since your first pet's name never changes, your answers to security questions can be instantly compromised across many digital services if they are revealed through digital snooping or a data breach.

The Wired article this passage came from is already two years old. Far from New Jersey imposing an "industry standard" password protocol, it is instead imposing one that is outdated and discredited, which stands to undermine its systems security, rather than enhance it.

And largely, it seems, because it does not seem to understand the unique needs of its users – who are not all the same. Some may log into these sites daily, while others (like me) only once a year when it's time to pay our bar dues. (What does this 90-day reset requirement mean for an annual-only user?) Furthermore, although things have been improving over the years, lawyers are notoriously non-technical. They are busy and stressed with little time to waste wrangling with the systems they need to use to do their job on behalf of their clients. And they are often dependent on vendors, secretaries, and other third parties to act on their behalf, which frequently results in credential sharing. In short, the New Jersey legal community has some particular (and varied) security needs, which all need to be understood and appropriately responded to, in order to improve systems security overall for everyone.

But that's not what the New Jersey courts have opted to do. Instead they've imposed a sub-market, ill-tailored, laborious, and needlessly demanding policy on their users, and then blamed it on NIST. But as yet another NIST study explains, security is only enhanced when users can respect the policy enforcing it. The more arbitrary and frustrating it is, the more risky the user behavior, and the weaker the security protocol becomes.

The key finding of this study is that employees’ attitudes toward the rationale be-hind cybersecurity policies are statistically significant with their password behaviors and experiences. Positive attitudes are related to more secure behaviors such as choosing stronger passwords and writing down passwords less often, less frustration with authentication procedures, and better understanding and respecting the significance to protect passwords and system security.

As NIST noted in a summary of the study, "'security fatigue' can cause computer users to feel hopeless and act recklessly." Yet here are the New Jersey courts, expressly implementing, for no good reason, a purposefully cumbersome and frustrating policy, one that could hardly be better calculated to overwhelm users, and which, despite its claims to the contrary, is far from a respected industry norm.

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Filed Under: new jersey, nist, passwords, security