THE LONG HISTORY OF PASSWORDS

THE LONG HISTORY OF PASSWORDS

The first recorded use of secret words to authenticate a human being dates at least as far back as ancient Rome, according to Joseph Bonneau, a University of Cambridge student who recently completed a PhD thesis on passwords and personal identification numbers, titled "Guessing human-chosen secrets." The Roman military developed a careful procedure for circulating daily watchwords known as signa to prevent infiltration by enemy soldiers.

 

Secret authentication words also appear in the tale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," included in some versions of the One Thousand and One Nights collection of folk tales, when the protagonist uses the famous phrase "open sesame" to unseal a magical cave.

 

Bernardo in Shakespeare's Hamlet may also be invoking a passcode when, at the opening of the play, he identifies himself to castle guards with the words "Long Live the King!"

 

The first use of passwords for a computer system is believed to have taken place in the 1960s with the Compatible Time-Sharing System at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to Bonneau (with additional color from Wired reporter Robert McMillan here). A password for each user account was stored in an unencrypted master file and was used to ration scarce computing time. According to both accounts, a doctoral student at the college admitted to what's likely to be the first-ever password compromise so he could increase the time available for his own projects.

 

The system saw what may be the first-ever password database leak in 1965 when a bug sent the file to a public printer, requiring administrators to manually reset every password.