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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Passwords are a very simple system that has been used since antiquity, its distribution in the Roman military having been described by Polybius.

    Passwords found use in early computing. The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) developed at MIT in 1961 implemented a PASSWORD command, which only hid the characters to be typed.

    The notion of hashing passwords was created in the early 1970s by Robert Morris. He also invented the crypt(3) algorithm, which used a 12-bit salt and invoked a modified form of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm 25 times to reduce risk of pre-computed dictionary attacks.

    The ease of implementation is why password-based authentication is used everywhere. But I might argue this is too simple and can be exploited by attackers. Year after year, a new hashing algorithm becomes considered not secure enough.