{"id":14107,"date":"2012-03-15T18:24:06","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T22:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbach.net\/blog\/index.php\/"},"modified":"2023-06-14T20:32:30","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T00:32:30","slug":"first-computer-passwords-useless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rbach.net\/index.php\/first-computer-passwords-useless\/","title":{"rendered":"First Computer Passwords Useless"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FirstRobert McMillan<\/a> at Wired<\/a><\/em> dug thru<\/a> the annals of tech and recently confirmed that passwords have been a pain in the tuckus for a millennium<\/strong>. But who\u2019s to blame? Who invented the computer password<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

\"Shakespeare\"<\/a>The origin of the password is shrouded in the mist of history like the invention of the wheel or the story of the doorknob, according to Wired<\/em>. Roman soldiers memorized spoken passwords to gain access to camps. Shakespeare<\/a> kicks off Hamlet<\/em><\/a> but where did the first computer password show up? Wired<\/em> asks.<\/p>\n

Computer passwords probably arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/a> in the mid-1960s. Wired<\/em> says nearly all the computer historians they contacted said that the first password must have come from MIT\u2019s Compatible Time-Sharing System<\/a>. In geek circles, it\u2019s famous. CTSS pioneered many of the building blocks of computing as we know it today: things like e-mail, virtual machines, instant messaging, and file sharing.<\/p>\n

\"IBM<\/a>Fernando Corbat\u00f3<\/a> who worked on CTSS back in the mid-1960s is a little reluctant to take credit. \u201cSurely there must be some antecedents for this mechanism<\/em>,\u201d he told Wired<\/em>, before questioning whether the CTSS was beaten to the punch in 1960 by\u00a0IBM’s<\/a> (IBM<\/a>) Sabre ticketing system<\/a>. When Wired<\/em> contacted IBM, big blue claimed it wasn\u2019t sure.<\/p>\n

According to Mr. Corbat\u00f3, even though the MIT computer hackers were breaking new ground with much of what they did, passwords were pretty much a no-brainer. \u201cThe key problem was that we were setting up multiple terminals which were to be used by multiple persons but with each person having his own private set of files,<\/em>\u201d he told Wired.<\/em> \u201cPutting a password on for each individual user as a lock seemed like a very straightforward solution<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Back in the \u201960s, there were other options, according to Fred Schneider, a computer science professor at Cornell University<\/a>. The CTSS guys could have gone for knowledge-based authentication<\/a>, where instead of a password, the computer asks you for something that other people probably don\u2019t know \u2014 your mother\u2019s maiden name, for example.<\/p>\n

But in the early days of computing, passwords were surely smaller and easier to store than the alternative, Professor Schneider says. A knowledge-based system \u201cwould have required storing a fair bit of information about a person, and nobody wanted to devote many machine resources to this authentication stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DataThe irony is that CTSS may also have been the first system to experience a data breach. The article recounts that in 1966, a software bug jumbled up the system\u2019s welcome message and its master password file so that anyone who logged in had access to the entire list of CTSS passwords.<\/p>\n

The story goes that an MIT Ph.D. researcher was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He received four hours per week, but it wasn\u2019t nearly enough time to run the simulations he\u2019d designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all the passwords stored on the system.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cThere was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a <\/em>punched card<\/a><\/em>,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLate one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

To spread the guilt around, Mr. Scherr then handed the passwords over to other users. One of them \u2014 J.C.R. Licklieder \u2014 promptly started logging into the account of the computer lab\u2019s director Robert Fano and<\/u><\/span>\u00a0leaving \u201ctaunting messages\u201d behind.<\/p>\n

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