While it isn't a password that is lost, the classic SF story "Twilight" by John Campbell has some of those elements.
A time travel visits the far future, and finds that men live in a world run by perfect machines, but they can't understand them because the language they use has changed over vast time.
"What is its end? I have seen it -- almost. I saw them -- the little
men -- bewildered -- lost. And the machines. Must it be -- can't
anything sway it?
"Listen -- I heard this song."
He sang the song. Then he didn't have to tell me about the people. I
knew them. I could hear their voices, in the queer, crackling,
un-English words. I could read their bewildered longings. It was in a
minor key, I think. It called, it called and asked, and hunted
hopelessly. And over it all the steady rumble and whine of the
unknown, forgotten machines.
The machines that couldn't stop, because they had been started, and
the little men had forgotten how to stop them, or even what they were
for, looking at them and listening -- and wondering. They couldn't
read or write any more, and the language had changed, you see, so that
the phonic records of their ancestors meant nothing to them.
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