That was my first guess. Based on how password looked it could have been a multi-line split or some sort of other such trickery. A set of macros perhaps...
That was my first thought on seeing the password: the string wasn't chosen per se; it was a string they could assemble (or block of memory reused) in a way that appears benign in a code review.
Actually, it's very likely the string was used for some other (valid) purpose and the pointer is being hijacked afterward -- it's VERY unlikely to appear as a singleton string constant anywhere.
The password looks like what someone would put at the start of a function to trace stuff; and, there's very likely a macro that does that all over the software.
Lets imagine what that might look like:
#define TRACE(__f, ...) \
const char *tok="<<< " __f;\
printf(tok, __func__, __VA_ARGS__);
u32 check_pass(const char *un, const char *tock) {
u32 res = valid(un, tock);
TRACE("(un='%s') = %u", __func__, un, tock);
res += valid(un, tok); /* could look like a cut/paste blip... */
return res;
}
