If it will not be CardSpace, it will be some other solution, but
the days of passwords as we know them today are numbered;
however, we should expect to see them around still for a signi?¬?-
cant time.
The Babel of Cryptography
In theory, the problem of preventing unauthorized individuals
from reading private data was solved long ago. An entire branch
of mathematical sciences, known as cryptography, is devoted to
similar problems. The operation referred to as encryption can
scramble any data to the point of making it useless to the casual
reader. The opposite maneuver, the decryption, involves reversing
the scrambling operation and setting the data to their original,
readable form. Encryption and decryption are made
possible by the use of logical equivalents of keys. As long as
Passwords are very
much alive
Cryptography
serves as the basis
of modern
computer security
The Babel of Cryptography 37
those keys are shared by two parties, they can ensure that nobody
else will be able to access the content they exchange. (We
go into much greater detail later in this section.)
Problem solved, then? No. Drawing that conclusion would be
as simplistic as saying that humankind has successfully
addressed the problem of universal communication, substantiating
the statement based on the fact that we discovered the concept
of spoken language.
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