eAuthentication Realities
You want to authenticate what???

Roger Clarke

Principal, Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, Canberra

Visiting Professor, Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre, University of N.S.W.

Visiting Fellow, Department of Computer Science, Australian National University

These slide-sets were prepared for presentation in 11 cities across Australia, July-October 2003, for the Australian Computer Society Professional Development Board

Version of 1 August 2003

© Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 2003

This document is at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/ACSeAuth.html

Abstract

This presentation takes a fresh look at the troubled area of authentication, including digital signatures, public key infrastructure and biometrics.

Remember that cartoon from the early days of the Internet, the one that said: 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog'?

Well what did it mean?

Marketers have long trumpeted the idea that, for Internet Commerce to work, each party (and especially the consumer) needs to be identified.

That simple idea has held Internet Commerce back for 5 years.

This presentation re-visits the question of what actually needs to be authenticated in order to stimulate trust in eBusiness transactions.

Slides

• the primary set (40 PowerPoint slides)
• a supplementary set on Nymity (set of 10 PowerPoint slides)
• alternative supplementary sets on Digital Signatures:
  • short (6 slides)
  • medium (12 slides)
  • long (30 slides)
• alternative supplementary sets on Biometrics:
  • short (12 slides)
  • medium (18 slides)
  • long (36 slides)

References

To get an idea of what the propositions are, you can read these papers:

• Cyberspace
  • Cyberculture: Towards the Analysis That Internet Participants Need
  • Encouraging Cyberculture
  • Ethics and the Internet: The Cyberspace Behaviour of People, Communities and Organisation
  • Information Privacy On the Internet: Cyberspace Invades Personal Space
  • "Information Wants to be Free"
• eBusiness
  • Electronic Commerce Definitions
  • A Brief History of the Internet in Australia
  • The Birth of Web Commerce
  • The Willingness of Net-Consumers to Pay: A Lack-of-Progress Report
  • Direct Marketing and Privacy
  • Ad Code Must Respect Web Culture
• Identities/Identification/Identifiers and Entities, Entification/Entifiers
  • Human Identification in Information Systems: Management Challenges and Public Policy Issues
• Nymity, Persistent Nyms
  • Anonymous, Pseudonymous and Identified Transactions: The Spectrum of Choice
  • Famous Nyms
  • The Digital Persona
• Identity Authentication
  • Human (Id)entity Authentication
  • The Mythology of Consumer Identity Authentication
• Digital Signatures and PKI
  • The Fundamental Inadequacies of Conventional Public Key Infrastructure
  • the index to my papers in the area
• Biometrics
  • Biometrics in Airports: How To, and How Not To, Stop Mahommed Atta and Friends
  • the index to my papers in the area
• Location
  • Mobile Technologies
  • Person-Location and Person-Tracking: Technologies, Risks and Policy Implications
• Trust
  • Trust in the Context of e-Business
  • Of Trustworthiness and Pets: What Lawyers Haven't Done for e-Business
  • Trust in Cyberspace: What eCommerce Doesn't Get
  • 'Meta-Brands'
• Appropriate Approaches to Authentication
  • The Authentication of Other Assertions Relevant to e-Business
  • Authentication Re-visited: How Public Key Infrastructure Could Yet Prosper

Bio-Data

Roger Clarke has conducted consultancy assignments through his company Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd since 1982. His primary expertise is in strategic and policy aspects of ebusiness and information infrastructure. He also has expertise in identity and identification, anonymity and pseudonymity, data surveillance, and privacy. He holds Commerce (IS) degrees from U.N.S.W. and a doctorate from the A.N.U. He spent the decade to mid-1995 in a senior academic position, and is currently a Visiting Professor in the Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre at U.N.S.W., and in eCommerce at the University of Hong Kong. He has held positions with the Australian Computer Society, and is on the Boards of Electronic Frontiers Australia, the Australian Privacy Foundation and Privacy International.

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Created: 27 April 2003

Last Amended: 1 August 2003

These community service pages are a joint offering of the Australian National University (which provides the infrastructure), and Roger Clarke (who provides the content).