The origin of password name

In 405 BC, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta came to an end. The Spartan army gradually occupied the dominant position and prepared to launch the final attack on Athens. At this time, the Persian Empire, which had stood on the side of Sparta, suddenly changed its attitude and stopped its aid to Sparta, with the intention of making Athens and Sparta lose both sides in the continuous war in order to profit from it. In this case, Sparta urgently needs to find out the specific action plan of the Persian Empire in order to adopt a new strategic policy. Just then, the Spartan army captured an Athenian messenger who returned to Athens from the Persian Empire to deliver letters. Spartan soldiers searched the messenger carefully, but for a long time, they found nothing except an ordinary belt full of chaotic Greek letters written by him. Where is the information hidden? Lysander, commander-in-chief of the Spartan army, focused on his belt. The message must be in those messy letters. He repeatedly studied these gobbledygook characters and rearranged the letters on his belt in various ways, but he couldn't figure it out. Finally, Lysander lost confidence. While fiddling with the belt, he thought of other ways to get information. When he accidentally wound the belt spirally around the scabbard in his hand, a miracle appeared. It turns out that those messy letters on the belt actually constitute a paragraph of text. This is the information sent back by Athens spies, telling Athens that the Persian army will suddenly attack the Spartan army when it launches its final attack. According to this information, the Spartan army immediately changed its battle plan, first attacked the unsuspecting Persian army with lightning speed, defeated it in one fell swoop, and relieved its worries. Subsequently, the Spartan army returned to Athens and finally won the final victory of the war.

The belt information sent back by Athens spies is the earliest password information in the world. The specific application method is that the communication parties first agree on the password interpretation rules, and then the communication party winds the belt (or sheepskin and other things) around a wooden stick with an agreed length and thickness to write. After receiving the letter, if you don't wrap the belt around a stick of the same length and thickness, you can only see some irregular letters. Later, this password communication method was widely circulated in Greece. It is said that the modern cipher telegraph is inspired by it.

China is one of the first countries to use passwords in the world. The most difficult "password" to crack was also invented by China people. The anti-tangent phonetic notation method appeared in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, which is to annotate another word with two words, take the initials of the upper word and the finals of the lower word, and "cut" the pronunciation of another word. "Anti-cutting code" was invented by Qi Jiguang, a famous anti-Japanese general and strategist, on the basis of this anti-cutting pinyin. Qi Jiguang also specially compiled two poems as a "password book": one is: "Liu seeks low gas while Liu seeks yang. English and Mongolian are happy, clap your hands and know the gentleman "; Another song is: "Spring flowers are blooming, autumn mountains are blooming, guests need to sing in golden cups, and solitary lamps burn silver pots." In the eastern suburbs, crossing the West Bridge, the first day is urged by the sound of chickens, and bells are set to cover ditches. "These two poems are all the secrets of anti-cutting code. Take the initials of 15 words before the last song and number them from 1 to 15 respectively; Take the vowels of the last 36 words, and the sequence number is 1 to 36. Then, the eight tones of pronunciation at that time were also numbered as 1 to 8, so as to form a complete "arc tangent code" system. How to use it: If the password sent back is 5-25-2, the control initial number 5 is "low", the vowel song number 25 is "west", the initial and vowel of the two words together are di, and the control tone is 2, the word "enemy" can be cut out. Qi Jiguang also specially compiled a "Eight-Tone Meaning Manual" as a teaching material for training intelligence personnel and signalmen.

The word "password" is no stranger to people, and people can cite many examples of using passwords. For example, passwords are used for secure communication devices, personal withdrawals at banks, computer login and screen protection, opening safes and children playing electronic games. This refers to a specific code or password. Modern cryptography has a long-term development than ancient times, and gradually formed a science, attracting more and more people to fight for it.