Password Policy

Engineering account passwords must include 2 numbers and 2 letters. In other respects our passwords meet the same rules as the Hawk ID passwords.

Passwords

• must be at least 9 characters long. We encourage a pass phrase of 15 or more characters.
• must include 2 numbers and 2 letters. We encourage using at least one non-alphanumeric character.
• cannot include any 4 consecutive characters of your engineering account ID or Hawk ID.
• cannot match a previous password.
• are valid for 365 days, but can be changed more often.

Elevated Privilege System Accounts

An account with elevated privileges has additional requirements: you must change the password at least every 180 days and the password must be at least 15 characters long.

What Makes a Good Password

Passwords protect your account from unauthorized access. For this reason, ECS implements password restrictions in order to deter password cracking. Passwords rules are listed above. In addition, we recommend that your password contain at least one non-alphanumeric character and that it not contain any portion of your name or another person's name as a part of your password. Because longer passwords are more difficult to crack or to guess, we recommend using at pass phrase of 15 characters or longer.

In general, if part of your password is a proper name or a word that appears in an English dictionary, it is not a secure password. If you have a dog named Ace, mydog=ace
would not be a secure password.

Valid non-alphanumeric characters are
         ,  +  -  $  [  ]  *  &  ^  /  %  {  }  |  "  '  ?  <  >  _  :

Do not use the characters :  \   !   @   # [space]