How the Vietnam War created single sign-on — and how it's evolved... (Connor Peshek)
summary
Claims that modern single sign-on traces to an NSA system called Bell Field created during Vietnam, which centralizes keys to issue one-time session keys so any phone can securely call any other; roots go back to WWII SIGSALY (12 installs, >50 tons) and KY-3/STU hardware (tens of thousands of dollars each). That design inspires Needham–Schroeder and Kerberos with a ticket-granting step, scales into Project Athena’s campus SSO, then into SAML (XML), and later into OpenID / OAuth / OIDC as browsers shift to XHR and JSON.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker background
- 1:25World War II cryptography and SIGSALY
- 5:36Vietnam War and AUTOSEVOCOM system
- 7:22Operation Purple Dragon and Bell Field
- 9:46Bell Field and single sign-on definition
- 10:30Jerome Saltzer and Project Athena
- 12:40Needham-Schroeder protocol and Kerberos
- 14:27Internet standards and SAML creation
- 16:55Browser wars and XML HTTP request
- 19:23OpenID and OAuth evolution
- 21:29Q&A session
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