Yeah, most modern software (if it's reasonably secure) doesn't actually store your password, but instead stores a large hashcode generated from your password. It doesn't know what your password is, but if you give it a password, it can hash that and compare the results. Thus, if someone downloads a system's "password" file, they can't see anyone's password, but they can generate hashcodes for common passwords or dictionary words or such and then see if any of the entries match. As long as your password isn't in the program's dictionary, they can't figure out what it is (on existing computers within a reasonable timeframe).
This is, of course, assuming the programmers of said software aren't completely ignorant of security issues. Alas, there's still the occasional bit of software that actually stores passwords because the coders were not qualified to touch security issues with a 10 meter cattle-prod and just didn't know any better...
Last edited by Dreamsmith; Jun 20, 2005 at 04:00 PM // 16:00..
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