Corporate IT still makes you change your password every N months. Tell them to extend the max session length beyond a day and some VP will have an aneurysm.
They don't want to change idiotic policies like this because it means they'd have to admit they've been dogmatically enforcing counter-productive policies for decades.
It's similar to the idea that if you aren't doing restore drills you aren't really taking backups. But people rarely test their auth rules.
edit: please note the "modern" qualifier, tons of IT orgs continue to mandate this anachronistic policy, sure, but those orgs aren't modern, the policy isn't a requirement for e.g. SOC2 or whatever, it's purely historical inertia.
Where do you live? That’s absolutely not my experience.
I had a friend in ~2015 that said they all had barcode scanners plugged into their computers (not 100% what they used them officially for) and so people would print their password as a barcode and stick it under their desk so they just had to scan the barcode to login (most/some/all? USB barcode scanners present as a keyboard and simply send scans as keypresses) due to silly password rotation rules. He said the people that didn’t use the barcode trick would instead just have a post-it note on their computer or, at best, under the keyboard or in a drawer.
I was reading about keyboard firmware last night and saw the ability to do “tap dances”, where a series of specific key presses in short order can trigger a predefined action.
It instantly occurred to me how useful it would be to be able to quickly type “QWE” and have one long complex password input for you automatically. Then “ZXC” for another, etc.
Of course flashing your passwords directly into your keyboard firmware is probably a pretty big security no-no.
But all the places that love to enforce constant password changes with super specific rules sure make something like that sound appealing.
The setting, funny enough, is literally "Set passwords to never expire (recommended)".
They also link to "Learn why passwords that never expire are more secure" in the same place.
Anyone who is forcing expiry is specifically going against recommended policies (Microsoft's, NIST's, and any serious security person) for some reason or other.
I obviously don't know which framework you are auditing against, so can't be specific, but it may be worth double-checking the requirements rather than relying on the assessor's word (if you aren't already). It is not unheard of for assessors to be behind on their understanding of best practices (especially those who've been an assessor for a long period of time - they may be going more by habit and previous engagements instead of the most up-to-date documents).
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=PI_... 11.6.2 (c)
Edit: jjav beat me to it below, confirming it is.
Use MFA, and you don't need to rotate.
>Clarified that this requirement applies if passwords/passphrases are used as the only authentication factor for user access (i.e., in any single-factor authentication implementation).
>Added the option to determine access to resources automatically by dynamically analyzing the security posture of accounts, instead of changing passwords/passphrases at least once every 90 days.
But the thought about the non-specified intervals in 11.6. is great, nowhere in there are any numbers to be found. So basically one can do the sensible thing, set some huge numbers that are no problem in practice and everything is fine.
It is a PCI requirement and probably from other sources.
Of course it is brain dead and we even have authoritative documentation from NIST explaining why it is stupid, but nobody at PCI has any technical skills to understand that so the madness lives on.
The only requirement for password rotation in PCI DSS v4.0 is if the password is the only form of authentication (i.e. no MFA). Use MFA (which you should be anyways) and you don't need to enforce password rotation.
>Clarified that this requirement applies if passwords/passphrases are used as the only authentication factor for user access (i.e., in any single-factor authentication implementation).
>Added the option to determine access to resources automatically by dynamically analyzing the security posture of accounts, instead of changing passwords/passphrases at least once every 90 days.
We just completed our PCI audit for the year and the auditor is adamant that this is the requirement.
Perhaps they're wrong, but fighting with the auditors is like wrestling with pigs, best avoided.