Password Helper 178 Mini-Program Launched: Making Your Passwords Safer

In today's information-driven life, nobody is a stranger to passwords—after all, we use them everywhere. But how much do you really know about passwords?

In essence, a password is a technique of obfuscation: the user wishes to turn normal (recognizable) information into unrecognizable information. Yet part of that unrecognizable information can be reprocessed, restored, and cracked. In Chinese, "密码" is the common name for "口令" (password).

The "password" you enter when logging into a website, accessing email, or withdrawing money at a bank should, strictly speaking, be called only a "口令" (password), because it is not an "encryption code" in the original sense—though it can also be described as a secret number. It is essentially a system of symbols intelligible only to a select few (such as the parties to a telegram), as in encrypted telegrams and cipher typewriters.

A password is a set of symbols compiled according to specific rules to transform information between plaintext and ciphertext for the two communicating parties. In other words, a password is a sequence of symbols that conceals the real content: information expressed in public, standard encoding is transformed, through a conversion method, into an encoding that no one other than the two communicating parties can read—and this unique form of encoded information is the password.

Figure 1: Password Helper 178

Passwords, however, are not absolutely secure. In the spirit of making everyone's passwords comparatively safer, our company reached an agreement with a client (who asked not to be identified) to develop a password helper mini-program. Its core function is to re-encrypt your password through algorithmic rules, an input feature code, and the password output length, with single- or multiple-choice output forms—making it more secure and far harder for ill-intentioned parties to crack maliciously.

Figure 2: Password Helper 187 mini-program page display

Soon after launch, the mini-program drew a large number of users to try it out. After experiencing it firsthand, they gave it favorable reviews one after another: regular, meaningful passwords become irregular and untraceable once encrypted by the algorithm, making people feel that their passwords are much safer.