Microsoft believes that changing passwords on a regular basis has no practical meaning
Earlier we mentioned that Microsoft is preparing a new security configuration level designed to provide users with simplified security settings without having to set the options individually each time. The latest blog post from Microsoft’s official blog explains these security configurations, and a few of them are outdated and have been abandoned by Microsoft. In particular, the strategy of requiring users to change passwords on a regular basis has been removed from the strategy. Microsoft believes that this strategy is old and outdated and has low mitigation value.
Microsoft explains:
Periodic password expiration is a defense only against the probability that a password (or hash) will be stolen during its validity interval and will be used by an unauthorized entity. If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it. And if you have evidence that a password has been stolen, you would presumably act immediately rather than wait for expiration to fix the problem.
If it’s a given that a password is likely to be stolen, how many days is an acceptable length of time to continue to allow the thief to use that stolen password? The Windows default is 42 days. Doesn’t that seem like a ridiculously long time? Well, it is, and yet our current baseline says 60 days – and used to say 90 days – because forcing frequent expiration introduces its own problems. And if it’s not a given that passwords will be stolen, you acquire those problems for no benefit. Further, if your users are the kind who are willing to answer surveys in the parking lot that exchange a candy bar for their passwords, no password expiration policy will help you.
Our baselines are intended to be usable with minimal if any modification by most well-managed, security-conscious enterprises. They are also intended to serve as guidance for auditors. So, what should the recommended expiration period be? If an organization has successfully implemented banned-password lists, multi-factor authentication, detection of password-guessing attacks, and detection of anomalous logon attempts, do they need any periodic password expiration? And if they haven’t implemented modern mitigations, how much protection will they really gain from password expiration?
The results of baseline compliance scans are usually measured by how many settings are out of compliance: “How much red do we have on the chart?” It is not unusual for organizations during audit to treat compliance numbers as more important than real-world security. If a baseline recommends 60 days and an organization with advanced protections opts for 365 days – or no expiration at all – they will get dinged in an audit unnecessarily and might be compelled to adhere to the 60-day recommendation.
Periodic password expiration is an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value, and we don’t believe it’s worthwhile for our baseline to enforce any specific value. By removing it from our baseline rather than recommending a particular value or no expiration, organizations can choose whatever best suits their perceived needs without contradicting our guidance. At the same time, we must reiterate that we strongly recommend additional protections even though they cannot be expressed in our baselines.
Most of the current Microsoft products have enabled multi-factor authentication or two-step authentication, which means that users will not have security problems even if they reveal passwords. Multi-factor authentication is equivalent to adding additional locks to the user’s account to improve security because Microsoft also strongly recommends that users must be able to use 2-step verification. Of course, Microsoft also emphasizes that all the above measures are just suggestions from the company to the user. The specific user can still configure it according to their own needs.
