Forums Community Password stops working Reply To: Password stops working

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Hugh

Thanks. Yes, I eventually worked out that this was how AxCrypt 2 handles passwords. May I make a couple of observations intended to be helpful?

First observation: when you see your encryption software telling you that you have the wrong password to log in, it tends to freeze your brain: you’re so appalled at the thought that you might have lost all your encrypted material, that it stops you thinking properly.

Second observation: clearly something happened to my account — I did something that I shouldn’t have — to cause it to invalidate the existing password. I’m guessing that I was presented with a dialog box to which I responded inappropriately, causing this to happen. If this happened to me I’m sure it can happen to others.

These two observations add up for me to a suggestion: In the pop-up that appears when you click on the red exclamation mark, why not add a few words saying something like: “Note: your login password isn’t necessarily the same as the password that encrypts your files. Click here for more information.” And the “here” could be a page that explains more or less what you explain above, namely that changing the login password doesn’t affect the password(s) used to encrypt the files. So if the user is confident that they know the encryption password(s) they shouldn’t worry about changing their login password because that doesn’t affect their encrypted files. At the moment, the “help” screens that I’ve seen tend to give the unintentional impression that changing the login password means that you won’t be able to decrypt files that were encrypted before the password change. In other words, the help page needs to make it clear that AxCrypt 2 combines the login and encryption passwords for convenience only. Changing the login password doesn’t affect the passwords used for decrypting the user’s files; all it means is that the user will get asked for the decryption password when they want to open a file.

Just a suggestion, but it would have helped me.