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0 pointsdrewcrawford12y ago0 comments

I think this is easier than it sounds. To a layman, when they type in their password, they are not thinking about how it would be implemented. The idea that "oh, somebody is doing a string compare against a password in the database" is not something that would enter their mind. That is baggage that software developers may have, but ordinary people have not been primed in that way.

Ordinary people are going to be thinking about a key in a lock. Does the lock on your house store the key inside? Maybe in some kind of information-theoretic sense but in the ordinary meaning of the word, no, it has a representation (that may not even be sufficiently specific to recover your key exactly). And if you lose your key you don't break into the lock to recover it--you call a locksmith to replace the lock, and get new keys.

That right there is an intuitive understanding of both hashing and good security principles that goes surprisingly far.

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ajanuary12y ago

Absolutely. I wasn't really clear. I didn't mean it needs an explanation of hashing. I meant there needs to be some short answer to the question of "if they can't pull out my password, how do the check it?"

I don't think people are thinking about keys and locks. Passwords are a thing that existed before computers and that people understand perfectly outside of an IT context. Spies in films use secret phrases to prove they're the contact, kids use passwords to gain access to the clubhouse. But in all these non IT contexts the person checking the authentication knows the shared secret, so it's obvious how they check it.

If my mental model is "I've arranged a secret password with this website that proves I'm really me", then my first question when told the website doesn't know what secret password is "well how does it know that the password is correct?".

The best I've been able to come up with today is a somewhat lengthy metaphone with color mixing.

[Edit] Having said that, I just went and talked to my technical literate non programmer wife and she used the key and door analogy.