Passwords Glossary

Browse 13 passwords terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

13 Passwords Terms

Hash Cracking
The attempt to recover original passwords or other secrets from cryptographic hash values, usually through guessing, dictionaries, rules, or brute force. Hash...
KeePass
A password manager known for local encrypted vaults and straightforward credential storage.
Key Stretching
Key Stretching is the deliberate increase of computational cost when deriving keys from passwords to slow offline guessing. Security teams use it to enforce...
Password Aging
The tracking of how long a password has existed since it was last changed, often used in policies that flag or force rotation of older credentials. Password...
Password Complexity
The rules or characteristics that define how varied a password's characters must be, such as length, symbol use, and mixture of character types. Complexity...
Password Entropy
A measure of how hard a password is to guess based on the unpredictability of the chosen secret and the attacker's likely search space. In practice, password...
Password Expiration
A policy requiring passwords to be changed after a set period of time, whether or not compromise is known. Password expiration remains common in some regulated...
Password History
A control that remembers previously used passwords so users cannot immediately reuse them when changing credentials. Password history is often paired with...
Password Salt
A unique random value added to a password before hashing so identical passwords do not produce identical stored hashes and precomputed cracking tables become...
Password Storage
The way a system stores password-related data, ideally using salted, memory-hard password hashing rather than reversible encryption or plaintext. Password...
Password Strength
The practical resistance of a password to guessing, brute force, and dictionary attacks based on its length, unpredictability, and whether it follows common...
PBKDF2
A password-based key derivation function that repeatedly hashes input with a salt to slow offline cracking. It shows up in application security, identity,...
Vaultwarden
A lightweight self-hosted password-manager server compatible with the Bitwarden ecosystem.

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