Puzzle of the Day

Some programs use passwords for access control, but do not protect the passwords in a very sophisticated manner (for example, by saving them in a file) or make determining the correct password very easy (for example, the Microsoft Word 5.0 encipherment scheme). The argument for using simple passwords and weak encipherment is that the data or programs being protected are of little value and the passwords give a small measure of privacy.

Given that what they are protecting is truly of little value, why is the use of such simple passwords and easily-broken enciupherments bad?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Steven Templeton for this suggestion.


You can also see this document as a Binhex Framemaker version 5 document, Postscript document, or a plain ASCII text document.
Send email to cs153@csif.cs.ucdavis.edu.

Department of Computer Science
University of California at Davis
Davis, CA 95616-8562



Page last modified on 2/27/97