Authentication Components: Engineering Experiences and Guidelines (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

My talk is on authentication components. What I mean by an authentication component is basically a reusable building block. I’m talking about building blocks in a strictly engineering sense (there is very little novel cryptograph use involved), building blocks that are useful to system designers when they’re designing a system and need a protocol for doing something, and they don’t want to reinvent all the cryptographic stuff themselves. Usually they are not experts in that either, so it’s a good thing that they don’t always reinvent things from scratch.