A password, sometimes called a passcode, the secret is memorized by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier. When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established authentication protocol, the verifier is able to infer the claimants identity.
If the permissible characters are constrained to be numeric, the corresponding secret is sometimes called a personal identification number .
Despite its name, a password need not be an actual word; indeed a non-word may be harder to guess, which is a desirable property of passwords.
