Consider this sentence:
This situation is analogous to the classic problem of cracking a hashed and salted password: We see the X as a password and Y as a salt.
What are the other ways to refer to the different "objects" here, instead of just using see? As the rest of my text is rather formal, see feels like a bad fit.
Edit:
To be crystal clear, my goal is to argue the use of the analogy by comparing the X and Y to the password and salt.
When I want to be formal, or very explicit about an analogy, I say, "X is analogous to the password and Y is analogous to the salt."
When I am being less formal -- or if I have just used the word "analogy" and I don't to sound repetitive -- I say, "X is like the password and Y is like the salt."
You could also say "X takes the role of the password", "X functions like the password", or many other words expressing a similarity.
You could also recast the sentence to compare the functions rather than the objects. For example, "Let's consider an analogy between my process and passwords. Just as a password is hashed using a salt value, so an X is framboozled using a Y."
In your example, X is an analog (or analogue, chiefly British) of password and Y is an analog of salt.
As I said in my earlier comment, the word regard might work:
We regard the X as a password and Y as a salt.
NOAD says:
regard consider or think of (someone or something) in a specified way
Another way to accomplish your goal is to give the language a more mathematical bent:
This situation is analogous to the classic problem of cracking a hashed and salted password; in this example, let X be the password, and Y the salt.
map
It is generally the practice to refer to this as mapping.
This situation is analogous to the classic problem of cracking a hashed and salted password: We map the X and Y to 'password' and 'salt' respectively.
Other ways of saying what you seem to intend to say...
X stands in the same relationship to Y as the salt of a password does to its hash.
or
A salted password is to its hash as X is to Y.
or possibly
A hash of a password is to its salt(?) as X is to Y.
but I don't know if salt can be used so freely on its own as hash.
