A variety of methods have been used to verify passwords in a network setting:

Simple transmission of the password

Passwords can be vulnerable to interception (i.e., "snooping") while being transmitted to the authenticating machine or person. If the password is carried as electrical signals on unsecured physical wiring between the user access point and the central system controlling the password database, it is subject to snooping by wiretapping methods. If it is carried as packetitzed data over the Internet, anyone able to watch the packets containing the logon information can snoop with a very low probability of detection.

An example of cleartext transmission of passwords is the original Wikipedia website. When you logged into your Wikipedia account, your username and password are sent from your computer's browser through the Internet as cleartext. Anyone could read them in transit and thereafter log into your account. More recently, Wikipedia has offered a secure login option, which, like many e-commerce sites, uses the SSL (TLS) cryptographic protocol to eliminate the cleartext transmission. But, because anyone can gain access to Wikipedia (without logging in at all), and then edit most articles, it can be argued that there is little need to encrypt these transmissions. Other websites (eg, banks and financial institutions) have quite different security requirements, and cleartext transmission of anything is clearly insecure in those contexts.

Another example of transmission vulnerability is email. Emailed passwords may be read by anyone with access to the transmission medium. Using client-side encryption will only protect transmission from the POP server to the client. Previous or subsequent relays of the email will not be protected and the email will be stored on multiple computers in cleartext.

Transmission through encrypted channels

The risk of interception of passwords sent over the Internet can be reduced by, among other approaches, using the Transport Layer Security (TLS, previously called SSL) feature built into many Internet browsers. Most browsers display a closed lock icon when TLS is in use. See cryptography for other ways in which the passing of information can be made more secure.

Hash-based challenge-response methods

Unfortunately, there is a conflict between stored hashed-passwords and hash-based challenge-response authentication; the latter requires a client to prove to a server that he knows what the shared secret (i.e., password) is, and to do this, the server must be able to obtain the shared secret from its stored form. On Unix-type systems doing remote authentication, the shared secret usually becomes the hashed form and has the serious limitation of exposing passwords to offline guessing attacks.

Zero-knowledge password proofs

Rather than transmitting the password, password-authenticated key agreement systems can perform a zero-knowledge password proof, which proves knowledge of the password without exposing it.

Moving a step further, augmented systems for password-authenticated key agreement (e.g. AMP, B-SPEKE, PAK-Z, SRP-6) avoid both the conflict and limitation of hash-based methods; An augmented system allows a client to prove knowledge of the password to a server, where the server knows only a (not exactly) hashed password, and where the unhashed password is required to gain access.

I want to share some thing about Online e-mail Support, email error support, Outlook Support and Computer Help