Security in Real Life

As early as 1978 Butler W. Lampson published a paper with the title "Protection" where he discussed what we now know as the Access Control List. During the 25 years since that time he has worked on security in distributed systems. In 1992 he publised a seminal work on "Authentication in Distributed Systems". In this paper he discusses the role of secret channels, the necessity of delegation by means of the "speak for"-relation, and a host of other issues.

The lecture consists of two parts. In the first he explains why "perfect security" is worse than no security. In the second he argues that his theory from 1992 is still the best tool to grasp the inner workings of the security regime of a complex system.