Getting Web Authentication Right (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

What an honour to be the person not talking about how to replace passwords [laughter]. I was struggling to come up with a metaphor for why I’m giving this talk after Frank’s talk, this was the best I could do. Does anybody know why I chose this?

Jonathan Anderson: Is that the fighter they had at the end of the war?

Reply: It is, yes. Towards the end of World War 2, the Americans started putting Merlin engines on to the P-51, which is still the most popular propeller plane for hobby pilots trying to acquire, and produced essentially the highest-performance propeller plane ever built This was in 1943, and it was the only time that we really perfected the art of getting a piston engine to make a plane go very, very fast. The Germans hadn’t invested in making a fighter of this generation because they were so caught up in making jet fighters, which you see coming down in flames in the background. By this point in history designers knew that propeller planes would be gone within ten years and jets would replace them for all the reasons that we use jets now, but in that window propeller planes were still a lot better: there were huge reliability problems and other issues with jets, and they couldn’t quite get to the performance that the best propeller planes had.