Invited Speaker Seminar: The Future of Web Authentication

Dr. Joseph Bonneau,
Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University

April 23 (4:00 pm)
Location: EV003.309

Abstract

Academic research has highlighted for years how passwords are both insecure and inconvenient for users. The death of passwords has been repeatedly predicted, though is yet to occur. This talk will discuss why academic models have repeatedly failed to capture the realities of web authentication and hence failed to understand the continued viability of passwords. In particular, large web sites have already moved well past simple models of password authentication to complex multidimensional models of authentication with a heavy dose of machine learning. This makes many aspects of password security much more challenging to model, but also raises a number of fascinating new research questions.

Biography

Joseph Bonneau is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Ross Anderson. He has worked at Google, Yahoo, and Cryptography Research, Inc. and holds BS and MS degrees from Stanford University.