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credential

Credentials are needed to gain access to information or resources.

A classical example of credentials is the combination of username and password.

Other types of credential providing include

biometrics (such as fingerprints, voice recognition and retinal scans)
X.509
public key certificates
…

See also

RFC-7617 defines the Basic HTTP authentication scheme which transmits credentials as user-id/password pairs, encoded using Base64.

The Windows Credential Manager.

The PowerShell command noun credential and the .NET class System.Management.Automation.PSCredential.