Perlman: I'm going to talk about identity, which is a buzzword. I hate buzzwords, because people think that they're conveying information when they say I do identity. It's like, there are so many pieces of it. This talk will explain all the various pieces, or a lot of them, and the various challenges with them.
Perlman: What is identity? It's a buzzword. Most people think they know what it means. If you talk about, I'm working in the identity space, they think they know what it means. There's a lot of dimensions to it, like, what is your name? How do you prove you own that name? How do I know your name? How do you make human authentication convenient? What does a browser need to know in order to authenticate a website? Will blockchain solve the identity problem?
Perlman: Names for humans, they're not unique. They should be. Mine is. I'm sure I'm the only Radia Perlman on Earth. You don't have a single name. You have a different username on every site you visit. You have lots of unique identities. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can use the same username on more than one site. Email addresses are sometimes used as unique identifiers. They're unique. An email address might be reassigned, so if you are John Smith at your company, and you leave, and they hire someone else, they might get the email address, John Smith. Even though there's a spec someplace that says, never ever reassign an email address to somebody else, just because things are written into a spec doesn't mean they're true. An email address can be shared by multiple people. It's common for a human to have lots of email addresses. In a company, the first John Smith gets the email address
[
Collection
]
[
|
...
]