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PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT

How is a PIN safer than a password?

Q My new Windows 11 laptop asks me to sign in with a PIN, while my old desktop PC, running Windows 10, requires a password. Microsoft suggests a PIN is more secure, but I simply do not understand this. The PIN on my Windows 11 machine is just four numbers, but the older computer has a password of a dozen letters. How can a four-digit PIN be safer than my longer password?

Derek Gillum

A This is a great question. In fact, the idea is so counter-intuitive that even Microsoft struggles to explain the logic on its blog post on the matter (at www.snipca.com/42499).

So, in simple terms, in the context of Windows 10 and 11, a PIN protects only a specific device, but a password protects your whole Microsoft account. We know even that doesn’t sound too convincing, but the details are tricky to grasp.

Now, again in the context of Windows, a PIN doesn’t have to be just four digits: it can be tens or even hundreds of alphanumeric characters (see screenshot 1). Obviously, though, we imagine most people do indeed set just a four-digit PIN. But what’s key is that whatever PIN is set can be used only to get into that specific machine.

Of course, it’s true that many people will use their same, favourite PIN on multiple device, but park that fact for a moment.

The crux is that your Windows 11 PIN is stored only locally, on the computer itself. This is true also of fingerprints or faces for ‘biometric’ logins, which are other options for Windows Hello 2, which is what Microsoft calls its modern login system.

Next, again in the context of Windows, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology makes a PIN much harder to guess or hack with a brute-force