Sam L’ecuyer on Macaroons: Cookies with Contextual Caveats

Los Angeles - October 28, 2015

Sam L’ecuyer on Macaroons: Cookies with Contextual Caveats

Description

This month Sam presented "Macaroons: Cookies with Contextual Caveats for Decentralized Authorization in the Cloud" by Arnar Birgisson and Joe Gibbs Politz and Úlfar Erlingsson and Ankur Taly and Michael Vrable and Mark Lentczner.

Cookies are the ubiquitous method of authorization on the Web, but they’re not without shortcomings. Subject to theft & forgery, cookies are essentially unsharable.

Sam will talk about macaroons as a way to safely share & delegate authorization between sites and services. Using very simple cryptographic methods, we can efficiently create and verify tokens allowing access under specified conditions.

The effects of this range from logging in to websites, increasing privacy on social media, and even more secure banking.

Bio

Sam is a Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo where he builds the apps that play the videos that people want to watch.


LMU CS The Los Angeles Chapter would like to give special thanks to Loyola Marymount University CS Dept. for sponsoring the October meetup.