2023-05-21 20:29:27
Remember this number: 60,510,648,114,517,025,000. is the number of combinations possible for a ten-character password, including spaces, case, numbers, and those damn special symbols that ask you now (where was the asterisk?) to log into your email box or homebanking page.
If it would take an average computer a few 220,000 years to try all the possible combinations, there is no human genius that can resist it or that can find the way around it: in these times, more than the Bible or the sermon of an electronic pastor, the password is holy word.
“It is a book that deals with the histories, the cultural contexts and the philosophy of passwords”, writes the English academic Martin Paul Eve in A history of passwordshis recently published essay here: “It’s a book about how ‘what we know’ became ‘who we are,’ about identity.” about how changing password technologies have culturally shaped ideas
The distinction is essential. From the myth of Theseus, the first hacker in history who was able to unravel the Minotaur system, or the fable of Ali Baba, in which you had to know the secret word to access the cave of 40 thieves, the password worked as rite of passage and transferable knowledge (it is not by chance that password means password).
“Different cultures at different times have needed to distinguish friend from foe, a need that was usually met by narrowing knowledge,” Eve writes. But now the password is as non-transferable as the fingerprint or the features of the face and, although it arouses suspicion about privacy, it also encourages possibilities for fiction: the theft of the hands of a dead person to open a vault in Switzerland or the transplantation of face to infiltrate a top-secret system.
This is the first column I’ve written on a new computer that I’ve unlocked by resting the ball of my right hand’s index finger on a button. It is practical? Yes, I no longer have to type letters or numbers. It is safe? What do I know But above all, what does that say about my identity? Recently, computer security believed that knowing the same as someone makes you that other person (a good example is the debit card password: it does not matter if you are the account holder or not; if you have the card and you know the password, the ATM will give you the money). Identity fraud, which shouldn’t be said theft because one remains one despite impostors, is a dilemma today: according to Eve, “the identity that we can extract from a password system is not identical to a person and cannot be to be”.
To be or not to be my finger: that is the question. In A history of passwords it is proposed that the perfect key does not exist, even if that key is a fingerprint or the iris of an eye. The best password would be to clone people. Even hateful, the password is constitutive of man: if Shakespeare was the inventor of the human, the first line of Hamlet already raises the passing question (who is going?) and anticipates 500 years to the mailbox when he rebukes from the screen: who are you?
ABC
A. Complex pass-through authentication systems were discovered in Greece and Rome, constituting the oldest known passwords.
B. Passwords fall into two categories: arcana, a secret that is not even known to exist, and secretum, the more common, a security mechanism that provides access.
C. Today the password is synonymous with identity: it no longer only allows an entry, but also indicates who a person is and what their known data is.