Passwords are nothing new. They have been around for centuries. For example, the Roman military used passwords to distinguish friend from foe. In the early 1960s, the concept of passwords was used by people accessing computer systems and sharing data. The purpose was to help keep individual files secret from other individuals. From there on, it became the de facto standard for computer security, both for personal and corporate use. At inception, securing passwords was not much of a concern. As time went by, and because of the boom of the internet, security became more of a concern as people started having sensitive information on the internet.

Hashing and salting were later introduced to aid in the security of passwords. Hashing performs a one-way transformation of the password, in essence turning the password into a string of characters. Salting...