Countersign (military)

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Countersign is a military term for a sign, word, or any other signal previously agreed upon and required to be exchanged between a sentry or guard and anybody approaching his or her post. The term usually encompasses both the sign given by the approaching party as well as the sentry's reply. However, in some armies, the countersign is strictly the reply of the sentry to the password given by the person approaching. A well-known sign/countersign is that used by the Allied forces on D-Day during World War II: the challenge/sign was "flash" and the answer/countersign "thunder".

The signs are often worked into a sentence in some way, nominally to obfuscate which words are key in case there are spies nearby. An example would be the sign "blue" and the countersign "moon". The approacher might say, "I'm feeling blue today... got any ideas of how I could cheer up?" The sentry could reply with, "Well, you could always moon somebody." In actuality it would be easy to figure out what the words are, although this method is better than shouting the words plainly. Presumably this effect is greater multiplied when the listener doesn't speak the language.

A similar technique is becoming common in computer networking, particularly for banking web sites. For example (as in Bank of America's "SiteKey" system), a user might enter his or her user-ID, but withhold the corresponding password until the server replied to the user-ID with a previously agreed-upon phrase and/or image. So long as the connection is secure, and the user can choose from a wide range of phrases and/or images in the set-up process, he/she can be confident that he/she is signing on to the legitimate site, rather than to a spoofed one.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.