It is considered good practice to not store passwords in
plaintext. Instead, when checking a whole password, it is common to store the result of passing the password to a
cryptographic hash function. As the user does not supply the whole password, it cannot be verified against a stored digest of the whole password. Some have suggested storing the digest of each combination of letters that could be requested, but they note that this results in generating and storing a large amount of digests. A better solution in terms of storage space and security is using a
secret sharing scheme. ==References==