It’s 2023, why are websites actively preventing pasting into fields like passwords and credit card number boxes? I use a password manager for security, it’s recommended by my employer to use one, and it even avoids human error like accidentally fat-fingering keys, and best of all with the credit card number I don’t have to memorize anything or know a single digit/character!
I have to use the Don’t Fuck With Paste addon just to be able to paste my secrets into certain monthly billing websites; why is my electric provider and one of my banks so asinine that pasting cannot be allowed? I can only imagine downsides and zero upsides to this toxic dark-pattern behavior.
There is even a mention about this in NIST SP 800-63B, a standard for identity management that some companies must follow in the USA, which mentions forcefully rotating passwords and denying “password paste-in” as antiquated/bad advice:
Verifiers SHOULD permit claimants to use “paste” functionality when entering a memorized secret. This facilitates the use of password managers, which are widely used and in many cases increase the likelihood that users will choose stronger memorized secrets
Edit: I discovered that for Firefox users there’s a simpler way than exposing your secrets to someone’s third-party addon. Simply open about:config
, search for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
, and change it from true to false.
Edit 2: As some have pointed out, that config value interferes with regular functionality on some sites. Probably best to leave it alone unless you know what you’re doing.
A couple years back, I had some fun proof-of-concepting the terrible UX of preventing password managers or pasting passwords.
It can get so much worse than just an
alert()
when right-clicking.The codepen.
A small note: It doesn’t work with mobile virtual keyboards, since they don’t send keystrokes. Maybe that’s a bug, or maybe it’s a security feature ;)
But yeah, best tried with a laptop or desktop computer.
How it detects password managers:
Unexpected CSS or DOM changes to the
input
element, such as an icon overlay for LastPass.Paste event listening.
Right clicking.
Detecting if more than one character is inserted or deleted at a time.
In hindsight, it could be even worse by using
Object.defineProperty
to check if thevalue
property is manipulated or ifsetAttribute
is called with thevalue
attribute.Could you not just disable JavaScript to get around that?
Not if JS creates the input in the first place :)