2Passwords

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One of software’s most crucial tasks is the protection of passwords. That may be surprising. After all, aren’t passwords part of systems that provide protection? Don’t passwords secure our accounts with banks, web retailers, and online games?

The truth is, while passwords are the keystones of computer security, they can become the targets of attacks. If a remote computer accepts your identity based on your password, a process known as authentication, it must have a list of user passwords to compare against. That password list is a tempting target for attackers. Recent years have seen a number of large-scale thefts of customer account ...

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