What is the difference between PIN and Password?
 |
| What is the difference between PIN and Password? |
What is the difference between a PIN and a Password? This is a somewhat complex question, but it is very common in the field of identity management and access to digital accounts. Personally, I know that the PIN is an abbreviation for the phrase P ersonal Identification Number , which means in Arabic " Personal Identification Number ". As for the password, as you all know, it means "secret word" or " password ".
To be honest with you from the beginning, personally, I have always wondered about the difference between a PIN and a password and I was unable to understand the difference between both methods in securing my devices such as smartphones , tablets or smart watches and I am sure that I am not the only one stuck in this dilemma.
So you can say that I finally decided to educate myself a little and search the Internet about the difference between a PIN and a Password and I tried to read some articles and reports that explain the difference between both methods in securing the identity of the owner and the real user of the device and the digital account. For more important articles, here is how to encrypt your confidential files on Windows without external programs.
With this in mind, I decided to share with you through I learned about this matter to help you understand the difference between a PIN and a Password in case you feel a little confused and perplexed like me when setting up your devices or accounts and so that you can determine and choose the best way to secure your devices. I will be as brief as possible so that you do not feel bored, but let me start by explaining each one separately.
🔅 What is the password?
 |
| What is the password? |
Of course, the password is the most popular and widely used method in the process of authenticating the account and securing the identity of its real owner. The password is called a term known as "Shared Secret", which contains the meaning that this data will remain shared between two parties with no third party. The first party is responsible for creating the digital account, while the second party is the person who owns this account. This method is one of the authentication methods to prove the right of ownership of the account to the first party in order to allow the second party the ability to access and use the account. Passwords are the most common method of securing accounts, but they are not always the best.
There are numerous reports issued by cybersecurity and identity protection sites that confirm that passwords are not the ideal way to secure and protect accounts. This is for a clear and obvious reason, which is that it can often be difficult for account owners to remember them, especially if they are complex, long, and contain different data such as symbols, upper and lower case letters, and numbers. Despite their level of complexity, they are still easy to hack. The reason for this is that there are millions of users who use the same password across a variety of different accounts on the Internet.
Troy Hunt, founder of Pwned Password , a website that helps users confirm whether their passwords have been hacked online, said that more than 86% of the passwords used in the site’s database were stolen in data breaches, which helped hackers and pirates impersonate the real owners of accounts, steal from them and blackmail them in more than one way. Note that we haven’t talked about the difference between a PIN and a password yet, but it will become clear in the next paragraph.
🔅 What is a personal identification number or PIN?
 |
| What is a personal identification number or PIN? |
So it seems clear that passwords are not the ideal way to protect the identity of users and real owners of accounts. But what is the difference between a PIN and a Password, although both authentication methods rely on the use of numbers similar to the same method used when setting and creating a password.
First of all, PINs differ from passwords in one very important aspect: PINs are used to secure the devices we use. This means that they are generated locally, which is different from passwords that are generated to secure online accounts. In other words, you create a PIN to secure your phone, tablet, or smartwatch, but you do not use it to secure your email client or social media accounts. There are very few websites that allow a user to secure their digital account with a PIN, but these are extremely rare, as PINs are designed specifically for local security.
In this context, we can clarify the difference between PIN and Password. Both PIN and password serve two different functions, the former targeting local authentication while the latter targeting remote authentication. The PIN is usually relied upon to unlock the phone, but a password is rarely used to achieve this purpose. Another, no less important, thing is that the PIN consists of 4 to 6 digits maximum, which makes it much shorter than passwords that start with at least 8 characters and can be extended to more than 16 characters or more.
✩ Local Authentication vs. Remote Authentication
 |
Local Authentication vs. Remote Authentication |
In the context of talking about the difference between PIN and Password, the user has a choice between two authentication methods: either local authentication or remote authentication. Local authentication using PIN aims to have a short and easy-to-remember security code that is stored locally in the device’s memory. While passwords aim to be longer and more complex and are stored on remote servers. Therefore, if you want the most complex method, you should rely on passwords, but the PIN remains the best method for encrypting the device locally because it is less complex than passwords.
That's why Microsoft recommends using a PIN to secure your PC with Windows Hello security along with biometrics. The PIN is stored locally on your device's memory, making it less likely to be stolen or compromised if remote company servers are attacked.
Although some may consider the PIN to be less secure than passwords due to the short length of the PIN code, in reality this belief is completely wrong because it is more secure than passwords because hackers or pirates will not be able to access it through hacking operations unless we assume that they were actually able to access your devices physically, which is completely unlikely because hacking operations carried out by hacker teams target cloud servers.
Conclusion
This article on the difference between PIN and Password was supposed to be a little shorter. But we hope we were able to clear up the confusion about the difference between the two authentication methods. The first method is local authentication, while the second method is remote authentication. Although both methods may seem similar at first glance, the first method, “PIN,” is better because it remains stored locally on the device’s memory and is not stored on remote servers that can be easily obtained in attacks and hacking operations, as happens with passwords all the time.