The beginning is a good overview of the basics and history of authentication, but overall the talk is a little odd.

He goes through the history of authentication protocols and their centralization, talks a bit about why pgp failed, then briefly mentions FIDO Passkeys and Web Authn, but doesn’t really cover them, before launching into a talk about how him and his company have solved decentralized authentication… it’s just all patented so you have to use his company to implement it… Which feels rather, not decentralized.

Also the recovery scheme of splitting and sharing the keys amongst your friends is interesting, but the whole video call to verify feels like a prime vector for phishing attacks in the AI age, and it honestly opens up a whole can of worms in terms of a) educating everyone on how that works and the importance of it, and maintaining their own cyber security, and b) edge cases like people who don’t necessarily have five people they trust… For instance, there are many isolated elderly people without that many truly close family and friends, and there are those in situations where family and friends may be abusive / untrustworthy. I feel like for something this important, we need the societal equivalent of a lawyer or notary that is trained, certified, regulated, and audited.