Password Complexity Requirements : can they be tweaked?

[johndoe]

We are considering whether to enable certain Password/Account policies on
our domain.

Is there a way to tweak the password complexity requirements so that only
two (instead of three, which is the default) of the four available character
types must be used?

The four character types are lowercase/uppercase letters (2), numbers, and
symbols.

Just curious to know if there's some registry hack or some tool to relax the
complexity requirements for our users.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Andrew Mitchell]

We are considering whether to enable certain Password/Account policies
on our domain.

Is there a way to tweak the password complexity requirements so that
only two (instead of three, which is the default) of the four available
character types must be used?

The four character types are lowercase/uppercase letters (2), numbers,
and symbols.

Just curious to know if there's some registry hack or some tool to relax
the complexity requirements for our users.

The only way I know of to achieve this would be to write your own password
filter to replace the standard passflt.dll that comes with Windows.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-
us/secmgmt/security/management_functions.asp?
FRAME=true#password_filter_functions

or

http://tinyurl.com/7xpeu

 

[Guest]

Not to my knowledge. I believe you have to write your own .DLL, or purchase
a third party one, to customize password requirements. As far as native
windows controls go, you just have a binary checkbox, on or off.