Why is authentication important?

I mean duh, why locks are important at all? Given that some communities are so secure people tend to forget to lock the front doors, similar to Apple products with no anti-virus apps, some niche communities and ecosystems were simply designed to be that secure. But for most of humanity and internet users that is simple not possible at the moment, so the locks exists!

Passwords

Dont be them.

Hashing, Encrypting and Enconding

The first is a way to reduce, the second mutates, and the third scrambles. As you could notice, reducing a string usually involves changing whole texts/phrases and combinations to key characters, similar to old world abbreviations, new world slangs and zoomer emoji culture? Mutating strings however combines some changes, along with insertions to produce even more complex phrase, and can be done over and over again. Scrambling however simply moves the characters around, preserving most of the structure and is very possible to reverse.

As we have learned in the last lab, token would be our gateway along with cookies to properly implement persistent authentication even after the browser is closed, but not as the computer shuts down since it is stored in memory? Your authenticated session (time from log in to log out) and browsing status is preserved as long as the tokens allows. Tokens are strings produced after authentication has been verified, it contains multiple parts related to the browser, and user info that verifies its still you using it. Cookies are what usually contains the token, along with other browser info and browsing history related to the website.

The best authentication out there!

If you ever made a new account, simple by linking other accounts to it, or access your repo at github from 3rd party sites using only github login screen, is exactly what OAuth does! And this really made life much easier as a user of tens of web apps. Basically you would authorize (allow use) the 3rd part to access other apps, after you have authenticated (verified use and intention) the action with that app.