The system was applied for preventing unauthorized
access to a range of resource types, from the computer
itself to single ?¬?les and applications. Password-gathering screens
blocked every access to the computer for those who didn??™t
know the machine password, documents and archives were
inaccessible to those ignoring the appropriate ?¬?le passwords,
and software packages would refuse to install without users
demonstrating knowledge of the product serial numbers.
Physical keys on the parallel port, often referred to as dongles,
appeared later and were an early example of the ???something I
Passwords act as
access gateways for
computers
Passwords: Ascent and Decline 31
know??? method. They never really became mainstream. We described
what the IT world looked like in the section ???The Dawn
of Cracking.??? For the time, those were adequate security measures,
and to some extent we can still consider them valid. Can
we consider them authentication? It is debatable. A de?¬?nition of
authenticationthat captures the intuitive idea could be something
like ???authentication is the process or the operation by
which an assertion about the identity of somebody is veri?¬?ed.
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