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We all know that passwords ought to be strong - strong enough to withstand common attack vectors, such as brute-force dictionary attacks or plain guessing. Most software systems with identity management also incorporate some kind of password policy enforcement and their configuration options (here, here, here and here).

There are even commercial standalone tools focusing on enforcing password policies. For example, the Password Policy Enforcer by Anixis or Specops Password Policy. Many of these products enable administrators to define policies and configure rules to prevent users from chosing weak passwords and comply to corporate security policies.

In this blog post, I'd like to show the principle steps in implementing a password policy enforcement component using flow rules, decisions and scoring (bonuses and penalties) to calculate the strength of a given password using Visual Rules. In contrast to commercial tools, which often already integrate with domain controllers, this example only shows the rules, not how it could be integrated into the Windows domain or into a web application.

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