Password

The concept of passwords as a means of identifying and protecting information goes back a long way, far beyond modern digital technologies. Historically, passwords have been used to provide security and control access to resources or territories. Ancient military campaigns, for example, often used verbal passwords to identify their soldiers at night.

In the modern world, the idea of digital passwords came along with the first computers. However, the concepts of “user” and “password” as means of protecting digital information were formalized in the 1960s. The development of operational systems that supported multiple users at the same time required mechanisms to identify and authenticate each user to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data.
The first implementations of password management systems were quite primitive by today’s standards, storing passwords in clear text, and making them vulnerable to unauthorized access. Over time, more advanced methods, such as password hashing, have emerged that have increased the level of security by turning a password into a unique set of characters (a hash) that is almost impossible to convert back to the original password.

One of the key features of modern password systems is the use of a salt, a randomly generated string that is added to the password before it is hashed. This ensures the uniqueness of hashes even for identical passwords, making attacks using off-the-shelf hash tables (so-called “rainbow tables”) much more difficult.
Despite the evolution of password protection mechanisms, the modern digital world reveals their shortcomings, in particular, due to the growing number of cyberattacks and data leaks. This has led to the search for alternative authentication methods, such as biometric data (fingerprints, face scans) and two-factor authentication.