History of Passwords

History of Passwords

In older versions of MS Excel and Word, passwords were stored as plain
text in the document header information. View the header and you could
read the password. This is valid for all versions older than Office
2000.

Windows once stored passwords as plain text in a hidden file. Forget
your password? You
could just delete the hidden file, and the password was erased.

Early on, Microsoft and Adobe both used passwords to mean that a file
was password
protected when opened with their applications. If you opened it with
another application,
such as Notepad, the password wasn't necessary.

Microsoft Access 2.0 databases could be opened as a text file easily
by just renaming them
with a ".txt" extension. Doing this allowed you to see the database data.
Adobe PDF files in versions 4.0 and older were printable and often
viewable using Linux PDF readers or Ghostview for Windows.

Wireless networks have a problem with encryption as the key for the
encryption can be
guessed once you collect enough encrypted data out of the air to find
the patterns and
guess the keys. With todays computing power in the normal home, the
key can be cracked almost immediately to find the password.

Bluetooth security is considered very secure, once it is setup. The
problem is that bluetooth transmits a unique, freshly generated,
password between the devices to establish the connection and the
password is sent as plain text. If that password is intercepted, all
future transmissions for that session can be easily decoded.