Are you weary of the prompts? You know when some website asks you to apply a password to your account? “Ensure that it has at least one uppercase letter, one number, a symbol, and some hieroglyphics.” Or, “Here’s a suggested password that you’re incapable of typing, let alone committing to memory.” It’s exasperating.
I hope you recognize the importance of applying a password to a digital account. And I trust that you’re familiar with the common rules: don’t use easily guessed passwords. Don’t use any words or terms easily associated with you. Don’t set the same password for every account. These admonishments are tedious but important.
Setting a solid password is a must these days. As a C programmer, you can bolster your weary password arsenal by:
- Understanding password strategy
- Creating basic, jumble passwords
- Ensuring the password has the required characters
- Taking a detour in the world of Mad Libs
- Using random words to build passwords
At its core, of course, a password is nothing more than a string. Authentication is a case-sensitive, character-by-character comparison of the input password with a password stored in an encrypted database. True, the process is more complex than this; I assume at some point the process involves a squirrel on a treadmill. Still, once decrypted, it’s that good old comparison that unlocks the digital door. The point of setting a good password is to create a key no one else knows about or can even guess.