What is the maximum password length for OS X ML?

Does anyone know what the maximum password length for OS X Mountain Lion is?

OS X originally only cared about the first 8 characters of the password, everything after that is allowed but ignored. I haven't seen any notes about this changing.

That hasn't been true for years now. As for the maximum I have no idea.

There is no maximum in the system per se - you can enter the entire text of Moby Dick if you want to - but I suspect that the the change password dialog box has some sort of upper limit, and you don't add any more entropy after 64.

Mac OS X: Effective Password Length of Eight Characters

Last modified in Feb of 2012

I wonder if the modification date was set based on the article being archived.

It's odd that it mentions "Products Affected: Mac OS X 10.0".

-t

From a post on this page : Maximum password length? - MacRumors Forums - from 2002 BTW

Any UNIX that is still using a DES crypt(). I haven't use many commercial unices lately (well, except OS X), but I'd be willing to bet most have moved to an MD5 crypt. (which allows for passwords > 8 chars). Modern linux and BSD distributions have. I have no idea why OS X isn't using MD5.

And a bit more info here : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...ssword-on-os-x

Oops, just found this : https://developer.apple.com/library/...d5crypt.n.html

Mac OS X Mountain Lion currently stores passwords using a SHA-512 hash with a 32 bit salt. The initial versions indeed used DES (which ignores anything beyond chars), but the last one to do that was 10.2. 10.3 had a freaky way of getting in by only using the first 14 chars (because Apple wanted compatibility with Windows and had not implemented NTLM authorization, they also stored a LANMAN hash, which is limited to 14 chars) but not for the main login window, and that hole has also been closed for a long time now.