Skip to main content

Password/Token/PIN definition

Password, Token, PIN, Passcode… every day we use this items when we need to authenticate in different systems. I observed that there are times, during a discussions, when is not very clear what is the difference between this items and the terminology is used in a wrong way.
Let’s see what each item means:
Password: It is a set of characters used during authentication process and is known by the user. The user can also set the password.
Token: It is a temporary access key that is generated by a provider (server, hardware device …) and can be used by someone to have access to different resources. A token cannot be change manually by an end-user to a friendly-value
PIN: It is similar to a password and is used during the authentication process. Normally the PIN is used when the user is partial trusted (for example mobile phone). In general a PIN is not very long and after several attempts of using a wrong PIN the account/device is locked. 
Passcode: Is a combination between PIN and Token and is used to authenticate in secure environment. This Passcode is available only for a limit period of time. Because of this the system can request to the user after a specific period of time to enter the Passcode again.
 
Using the correct term is very important, because the way you implement the authentication process can be very different if you are using a token or a password for example.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(...

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...

Navigating Cloud Strategy after Azure Central US Region Outage

 Looking back, July 19, 2024, was challenging for customers using Microsoft Azure or Windows machines. Two major outages affected customers using CrowdStrike Falcon or Microsoft Azure computation resources in the Central US. These two outages affected many people and put many businesses on pause for a few hours or even days. The overlap of these two issues was a nightmare for travellers. In addition to blue screens in the airport terminals, they could not get additional information from the airport website, airline personnel, or the support line because they were affected by the outage in the Central US region or the CrowdStrike outage.   But what happened in reality? A faulty CrowdStrike update affected Windows computers globally, from airports and healthcare to small businesses, affecting over 8.5m computers. Even if the Falson Sensor software defect was identified and a fix deployed shortly after, the recovery took longer. In parallel with CrowdStrike, Microsoft provi...