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A password to encrypt a document restricts opening and viewing it. This is possible in all Microsoft Office applications. Since Office 2007, they are hard to break if a sufficiently complex password was chosen. [citation needed] If the password can be determined through social engineering, the underlying cipher is not important.
Systems that use passwords for authentication must have some way to check any password entered to gain access. If the valid passwords are simply stored in a system file or database, an attacker who gains sufficient access to the system will obtain all user passwords, giving the attacker access to all accounts on the attacked system and possibly other systems where users employ the same or ...
A random password generator is a software program or hardware device that takes input from a random or pseudo-random number generator and automatically generates a password. Random passwords can be generated manually, using simple sources of randomness such as dice or coins , or they can be generated using a computer.
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Brute-force attacks work by calculating every possible combination that could make up a password and testing it to see if it is the correct password. As the password's length increases, the amount of time, on average, to find the correct password increases exponentially. [6]
Lists of common passwords are widely circulated and many passwords are short enough that even all possible combinations may be tested if calculation of the hash does not take too much time. [29] The use of cryptographic salt prevents some attacks, such as building files of precomputing hash values, e.g. rainbow tables.
The salt and hash are then stored in the database. To later test if a password a user enters is correct, the same process can be performed on it (appending that user's salt to the password and calculating the resultant hash): if the result does not match the stored hash, it could not have been the correct password that was entered.
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