50: De-identified authentication at scale

Meta Tech Podcast

If you hear privacy and your first thought is laborious processes and access management, this interview may be just as mind-expanding for you as it was for our host Pascal. He is joined by Alex and Haozhi who talk about the Anonymous Credential Service (ACS), a highly available multitenant service that allows clients to authenticate in a de-identified manner. They discuss the cryptographic primitives powering the service and the various challenges they encountered scaling it to support Meta's products.

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Links

• How Meta enables de-identified authentication at scale - https://engineering.fb.com/2022/03/30/security/de-identified-authentication-at-scale/

• Open-sourcing Anonymous Credential Service - https://engineering.fb.com/2022/12/12/security/anonymous-credential-service-acs-open-source/

• ACS on GitHub - https://github.com/facebookresearch/acs

• ReactJS - The Documentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pDqJVdNa44

Timestamps

• Intro 0:12

• Alex and Haozhi Intro 1:22

• Cryptography and Privacy 2:47

• Team Mission 3:35

• Data Minimisation 4:28

• PETs 5:13

• Why authenticate? 8:39

• ACS under the hood 10:06

• ACS Architecture 16:02

• Challenges 21:03

• ACS in Open Source 26:36

• Key-Derivation Functions 29:22

• How to get started 32:10

• Outro 33:47

• Bloopers 34:29