Why can’t people access saved passwords of Apps in PCs

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Today when I tried to open steam offline and I was logged out it still accepted my Username and Password so those must be stored in some file from steam’s directory. My speculation is encryption but just wanted the explanation from someone who actually knows it.

In: Technology

Anonymous 0 Comments

Let’s say your password was made of paint.

Your password is:

blue, blue, blue, blue, red, red, yellow

When you put it into the computer, the computer stores a bluey-purpleish color.

If you showed that bluey-purpleish color to someone, it would be hard for them to know exactly how many parts blue, red, or yellow you used without mixing the colors themselves and comparing the result

If you used even more and greater variety of colors, it would become effectively impossible for them to guess your input colors and even if they tried to mix all the different possible combinations themselves, it would take a very long time.

Your computer can store the mixed color and it knows how to do the mixing, so if you enter the right combination of input colors that result in the same output color, it can be confident that you knew the password, even if it doesn’t know what the password is.

This output color, when applied to text passwords is called a hashed password because the mixing process is called hashing.

In fact, websites are only supposed to store your hashed password so if someone breaks into their database, they won’t get your password to try on other websites.