Fwd: [security-lunch] July 23 | Alan Karp on "You've Got the Wrong Use Case"

[Alan Karp]

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Alan Karp

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Rumaisa Habib <rum...@stanford.edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Subject: [security-lunch] July 23 | Alan Karp on "You've Got the Wrong Use Case"
To: securit...@lists.stanford.edu <securit...@lists.stanford.edu>

Security Lunch ☀️ Ed. — Wednesday,  July 23rd, 2025, 12:00 pm @ CoDa E160

You've Got the Wrong Use Case

Alan Karp

Can't make it in person? Join us on zoom.

See our past & upcoming events on our website! 

Abstract: It's a good idea to start the design of a system by selecting a set of use cases that represent what you want the resulting system to do.  Clearly, the quality of your use cases will affect how suitable what you build is.

I've been lurking on a number of discussions of Identity and Access Management designs.  Some of them never saw the light of day.  Others shipped and ran into access management problems.  The reason for both kinds of failure is that the developers chose use cases that were too simple for how their systems are actually used.

In this talk, I'll walk through a number of examples and explain what these simple use cases miss.  I'll then present what I think is the simplest use case that covers all access management hazards. 

Bio: Alan Karp has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland and was an assistant professor of physics at Dartmouth College, where he learned he couldn't write a decent grant proposal if his academic career depended on it, which it did. He then went over to the dark side, doing 15 to life at IBM and more than 20 years at HP Labs. Alan worked in a variety of fields, including processor architecture as one of the designers of the Itanium, game theory, work that explained a non-intuitive Nash equilibrium, and distributed systems, where his research was turned into an HP product that was later described as "web services before there were web services." His last several years at HP were spent building systems that were made easier to use by adding security. To learn about his other work, search for Cash-Karp Runga Kutta, Karp-Markstein division, the Karp-Flatt metric, and the Karp Challenge. After leaving HP he tried being retired but didn't like it, so he became Principled (not a typo) Architect at EARTH Computing, a startup bringing to market a new kind of datacenter network. When EARTH Computing folded, he decided to complete SitePassword, a different kind of password manager that started with a 2002 implementation. Alan received two IBM Technical Innovation Awards and is actually proud of a few of his 75+ patents.

                                                                    

Rumaisa Habib 🐸

CS PhD Student, Stanford University

rumaisahabib.com

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[Mark S. Miller]

Please record if possible!

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  Cheers,
  --MarkM

[Alan Karp]

These talks are not recorded.

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Alan Karp

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[๏̯͡๏ Jasvir Nagra]

You'll just have to give it again some place where it is Alan.

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Jasvir Nagra

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[Mark S. Miller]

Please!

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  Cheers,
  --MarkM

[Alan Karp]

I can give it at Agoric.

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Alan Karp

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[Matt Rice]

Don't know if it is possible to correct it, but there seems to be a
typo in the bio, misspelling "Runge" as "Runga", and weirdly the "g"
looks like a "q", in the font,
seems like it got transcribed phonetically?

[Alan Karp]

Nice catch.

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Alan Karp

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