People usually assume that “the identity problem” is well-understood, and that, given how long Internet authentication has been deployed, the world has solved how to do that (whatever “that” is) securely. What exactly is “the identity problem"? For instance, how does a website get a name, how does a website get a certificate, how does a browser know who to trust to sign certificates, how does a human know the name of a website, how does a human acquire a unique name and prove they own that name? Surprisingly, there are issues with all of these aspects as deployed today. As with most security problems, some people propose “blockchain” as being “the solution”. This talk will describe what aspects of identity and authentication blockchain might address, and compare a “blockchain“ approach with what is deployed today. If the talk spurs spirited debate, all the better.
Speaker
Radia Perlman
Pioneer of network design, Inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol, Fellow @DellTech
Radia Perlman is a Fellow at Dell Technologies. She is known for inventing fundamental networking technology enabling robust, largely self-managing, and scalable link state routing, used in the specific protocol she designed (IS-IS), and similar protocols (OSPF). She also invented the spanning tree algorithm which transformed Ethernet from a technology that supported a few hundred nodes within a single building, to something that could support large networks. She also has made contributions in network security, including scalable data expiration, distributed algorithms despite malicious participants, and DDOS prevention techniques. She is the author of the textbook “Interconnections” (about network layers 2 and 3) and coauthor of “Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World” (the 3rd edition of which was published this year). She has been recognized with many industry honors including induction into the National Academy of Engineering, the Inventor Hall of Fame, The Internet Hall of Fame, Washington State Academy of Science, and lifetime achievement awards from Usenix and SIGCOMM. She has a PhD in computer science from MIT.
