All are invited to a talk by information security and privacy professional Jeffrey Goldberg titled “Building Modern Authentication in the Before Times.” The event will be held at on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, at 11:25 a.m. – 12:40 p.m. Central Time at the Stuart Building, room 113.

For more info, see: http://www.cs.iit.edu/~nsultana1/techtalks/

Abstract

In 2015 the password manager vendor for whom I worked needed to deploy an authentication mechanism with very strong security properties.

This presentation discusses some of the choices and solutions we found, the gap between what may seem deployable to academic and cryptographers on the one hand, and the non-cryptographer software developers on the other, and navigating to a solution under time pressure. Although there are excellent tools and solutions that have become available over the past decade, development teams are likely to experience similar sorts of problems even though none of the specific details from ten years ago apply.

Biography

Jeffrey Goldberg is a PhD dropout (Linguistics) from the 1980s, and ended up following a path from academia to system administration to information security that was not uncommon during the last quarter of the twentieth century. From 2010 until retirement in 2023 he worked at 1Password, with the sometime job title of Chief Defender Against the Dark Arts. He is not authorized to speak on behalf of 1Password, nor may he disclose any information that has not already been made public.