Summary: The creator of bcrypt, a password hashing algorithm, reflects on its 25th anniversary and the continued reliance on passwords in computer security. Passwords have been used for authentication and data protection since the early days of multi-user computing systems, with Unix introducing the crypt password hashing function in the 1970s. Crypt was refined in Unix's 7th edition with the introduction of a 12-bit salt and iteration of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher to create a hash from a user's password. While considered secure for its time, new algorithms such as MD5crypt emerged due to short-sighted US export policies and advances in computational power. Bcrypt was created in 1997 to address these issues and remains a popular password hashing algorithm today.