NOBSPW - No Bullshit Password strength checker

NOBSPW is simple, no non-sense password strength checker written in Ruby. It does NOT validate against bullshit password rules such as:

• must contain uppercase (bullshit!)
• must contain lowercase (bullshit!)
• must contain a number (bullshit!)
• must contain a special character (bullshit!)

Instead, it validates your user's password against a few important criteria. This ensures strong passwords without the hassle generally associated with complex (and useless) password rules.

The criteria currently are:

• enforce minimum (and maximum) length. 10 characters is the recommended minimum and is the default value
• reject common passwords from a dictionary of the 100,000 most common passwords (or your own dictionary)
• requires basic entropy (not too many of the same character)
• reject special case passwords such as the user's name, email, domain of the site/app

This software was inspired by Password Rules are Bullshit by Jeff Atwood.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'nobspw'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install nobspw

Usage

Vanilla Ruby

  pwc = NOBSPW::PasswordChecker.new password: 'mystrongpassword',
                                    name: 'John Smith',           # optional but recommended
                                    username: 'bigjohn43',        # optional but recommended
                                    email: '[email protected]'     # optional but recommended
  pwc.strong?
  pwc.weak?
  pwd.weak_password_reasons  # returns an array of Symbols with reasons why password is weak
  pwd.reasons                # short alias of weak_password_reasons

Optionally, you can configure some options:

  NOBSPW.configure do |config|
    config.min_password_length = 10
    config.max_password_length = 256
    config.min_unique_characters = 5
    config.dictionary_path = 'path/to/dictionary.txt'
    config.grep_path = '/usr/bin/grep'
    config.use_ruby_grep = false # Defaults to false; slower when true. Uses Ruby's internal Grep method instead of shelling out.
    config.domain_name = 'mywebsitedomain.com' # it is recommended you configure this
    config.blacklist = ['this_password_is_not_allowed', /password/]
  end

Ruby on Rails

I included PasswordValidator for Rails. Validating passwords in your model couldn't be easier:

validates :password, presence: true, password: true, if: -> { new_record? || changes[:password] || changes[:password_digest] }

PasswordValidator will try to guess the correct field name for each PasswordChecker argument as follow:

• username: username user_name user screenname screen_name
• name: name full_name first_name+last_name
• email: email email_address

If you have field names different than above, you can tell PasswordValidator which fields to use for specific attributes:

validates :password, password: { :name => :customer_name,
                                 :email => :electronic_address },
          if: -> { new_record? || changes[:password] || changes[:password_digest] }

Validations

NOBSPW currently validates for the following, in this order:

password_empty?
name_included_in_password?
email_included_in_password?
domain_included_in_password?
password_too_short?
password_too_long?
not_enough_unique_characters?
password_not_allowed?
password_too_common?

If any of these tests fail, they'll be returned by #reasons, or with Rails, they'll be added to errors[:password].

Custom Validations

It is possible and easy to add your own validations, or remove default ones.

Adding a custom validation

module NOBSPW::ValidationMethods
  def contains_letter_a?
    # This is obviously a silly validation. Don't do this!
    # If method returns true, it means that it FAILED validation.
    # For example, it does contain the letter a and it's not considered acceptable.
    !!@password.downcase.index('a')
  end
end

NOBSPW.configuration.validation_methods << :contains_letter_a?

# if using the Rails validator, you also need to define the error message:
ActiveModel::Validations::PasswordValidator.error_messages[:contains_letter_a] = \
  'contains an unacceptable character'

Removing a built-in validation

NOBSPW.configuration.validation_methods.delete(:domain_included_in_password?)

Localization

You can localize all error messages, including custom ones, using I18n.

See PasswordValidator#get_message and PasswordValidator#DEFAULT_ERROR_MESSAGES for implementation details.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.