Jefferson's Wheel

Atlas Obscura has an article about Karsten Nohl (PhD 2009):
Exit Interview: I’m A Crypto-Specialist Working To Secure the Internet For A Billion People, Jeremy Berke, 28 July 2015.

One of the things we’re building is a PayPal competitor–with a modest target of having a few hundred million customers. Everything in India is always on a massive scale. If you could get rid of PayPal passwords, and instead just have a fingerprint–if you could pay for goods at a store with just your fingerprint, that would simplify people’s lives a lot. It would also have the secondary effect of saving some of the security problems, like phishing, that we currently encounter. And this government database is a huge enabler.

If we already have a mandate to collect everybody’s fingerprints, why not use it in the customer’s benefit? The privacy risk is always there. That’s the law and I can’t argue with that. But if the law is already creating this risk, why not create opportunity in the same step?

I gave a talk at the USENIX Security Forum for new researchers on “How to Live in Paradise: A Guide for New and Disgruntled Professors” (reprising a similar talk I gave last year).

This website includes text expanding on the talk and a video of last year’s version.