Behind Closed Doors: Managing Passwords in a Dangerous World

Wednesday, December 7, 2016 - 4:00pm4:45pm

Noah Kantrowitz

Abstract: 

Secrets come in many forms, passwords, keys, tokens. All crucial for the operation of an application, but each dangerous in its own way. In the past, many of us have pasted those secrets in to a text file and moved on, but in a world of config automation and ephemeral micro-services these patterns are leaving our data at greater risk than ever before.

New tools, products, and libraries are being released all the time to try to cope with this massive rise in threats, both new and old—but-ignored. This talk will cover the major types of secrets in a normal web application, how to model their security properties, what tools are best for each situation, and how to use them with major web frameworks.

Noah Kantrowitz

Noah Kantrowitz is a web developer turned infrastructure automation enthusiast, and all around engineering rabble-rouser. By day he builds tools and teaches, and by night he works with the Python Software Foundation infrastructure team. He is an active member of the Chef community, and enjoys merge commits, cat pictures, and beards.

LISA16 Open Access Sponsored by Bloomberg

Open Access Media

USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.

BibTeX
@conference {201497,
author = {Noah Kantrowitz},
title = {Behind Closed Doors: Managing Passwords in a Dangerous World},
year = {2016},
address = {Boston, MA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = dec
}

Presentation Video 

Presentation Audio