Stanford Seminar - A Hybrid Password Manager

April 12, 2023 Alan Karp Do you use a password manager? You should. How else are you going to have a different strong password for every site you log into. There are plenty to choose from. The problem is that they remember your passwords for you, which means you are dependent on them. What if yours goes out of business, as one with over 100,000 users recently did? SitePassword is different. It doesn't remember your passwords; it calculates them. You can get your password as long as you can remember one strong password along with your user id and nickname for the site. That puts you in full control of your passwords. When a calculated password won't do, SitePassword can store one you create without your having to rely on someone else's cloud storage. In this talk I'll explain how SitePassword works and give a demo. I'll discuss some human factors considerations and include a few war stories describing some of the strange things websites do on their login pages. There are security issues relevant to all password managers, and I'll explain how SitePassword addresses them About the speaker: Alan Karp has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland and was an assistant professor of physics at Dartmouth College until he learned he was expected to spend all his time writing grant proposals. He then went over to the dark side, doing 15 to life at IBM and more than 20 years at HP Labs. Alan worked in a variety of fields, including processor architecture as one of the designers of the Itanium, game theory, where he built an automated negotiation tool, and distributed systems, where his research was turned into an HP product that was later described as "web services before there were web services." His last several years at HP were spent building systems that were made easier to use by adding security. After leaving HP he tried being retired but didn't like it, so he became a Principled Architect at EARTH Computing, a startup bringing to market a new kind of data