File Exchange Pick of the Week

October 5th, 2007

Masking typed passwords with asterisks

Sometimes really good files fly under my radar here at the File Exchange. Thankfully, my buddy Brett noticed this little gem. Here is what he had to say about it:

A customer recently mentioned that he wanted to provide username and password information to a function for reading and writing URLs in a password-protected environment. Modifying URLREAD to take additional inputs was easy, and it wasn’t too difficult to extract from some CSSM conversations an approach to modifying the core-MATLAB function to authenticate the password. My initial coding approach, however, required that the user visibly type (and therefore display) his password on his monitor. So the next step was implementing a dialog box that would hide passwords with a string of asterisks. While not an exceptionally daunting task, this is not necessarily trivial, either. But a quick search of the File Exchange revealed that Jeremy Smith had already implemented and posted code to do just that, in his LOGIN submission. I was able to steer the customer to Jeremy’s code, and save both of us a good bit of coding—and isn’t that what the FEX is all about? While LOGIN may not suffice for extremely secure environments, its visual masking of passwords sufficed for this customer, and for most applications that I can think of. Nice work, Jeremy!

Video Content


Get the file here.

By Doug Hull

07:36 UTC | Posted in GUI or GUIDE, Video promotion | Permalink |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Wrap code fragments inside <pre> tags, like this:

<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

If you have a "<" character in your code, either follow it with a space or replace it with "&lt;" (including the semicolon).

About

Bob, Brett & Jiro share their favorite user-contributed submissions from the File Exchange.

Subscribe


Recent Comments

  • Beats: Not useful for everyday but very interesting. Thanks.
  • nickey: Hi Brett, I’ve tested Tao’s program and yours too. They ran successfully. I’ve tried to...
  • Kika: THANK YOU!! I’ve been trying to change the colormap but I didn’t know what to do. It was driving me crazy!...
  • Richard: Hello Doug, yet another question. I followed this tutorial: http://blinkdagger.c om/matlab/matlab-...
  • Doug: Richard, Use the compiler options file, it is found at the bottom of the dialog that you get when clicking on...
  • Richard: To whom it may concern, a solution to the dos screen annoyance is found by user ‘vihang’ in this...
  • Richard: Thank you for your reply. I understand that I can specify flags using the mcc command, but is this also...
  • Doug: Richard: Find it here: http://www.mathworks .com/access/helpdesk /help/toolbox/compil er/mcc.html Doug
  • Richard: Hello Doug, Can you explain point 56. (about the -e flag) because I can’t seem to find it. Regards,...
  • Doug: Tony, When you say the .MAT file has 984 files, you mean it has the *names* of the files. So the real problem...

Blog Admin

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.