It doesn't need to be super-strong. Just enough to prevent snooping. Locking just the program won't be enough because anything that can read DBM could read it. I know how to validate passwords, but I wondered if there was a common way to do this. It' a console based program to manage entries in a logbook. It will need to be able to unlock the database for multiple runs of the program as a run is neccesary to execute a command (such as add an entry, delete, list, etc.).