PasswordsCon

PasswordsCon was first held in Bergen, Norway, in December 2010. Sponsored by Professor Emeritus Tor Helleseth at the Selmer Center, Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway. I really cannot express words how grateful I am to this day for his kindness, generosity & faith in me making PasswordsCon a reality. There’s a somewhat funny story about its inception. In the late 2009/early 2010, Per Thorsheim (that’s me) was working for the same employer as his wife Kjertsti. She knew of my password obsession at work, and suggested that I should talk about it at the FRISC (Now COINS) winter school for PhD’s & professors in spring of 2010. Having no academic background whatsoever, I immediately said yes when I was offered attending a full week at Finse 1222, listening to talks and discussion on information security. Specifically, Tor asked me if I could do a “rump session“. Honestly, I thought that was some academic l33t-speak & didn’t ask any further questions. I spent weeks preparing my slide deck, only to find myself missing from the printed program when arriving at Finse. Not sure if I had been forgotten, I asked and was told that I could do my talk starting at 21:00, after dinner. “Sure”, I said, “no problem at all.” So I started at 21:00, and I think I finished approximately 2 hours later. Happy with my talk, I received quite a few questions & comments as well. Only to be approached by Tor afterwards telling me that a “rump session” was supposed to be 5-10 minutes, tops. Oops. Anyways, the real students got their chance to present their work during the other evenings, after I sort of crashed the agenda, so to speak. Some time after this Tor called me and said that he had never thought the topic of passwords could be that broad or deep as I had presented, so he suggested we should do a conference dedicated to the topic. He could sponsor it all, as long the conference was free, open and held at the university of Bergen. With a “shoestring budget”, we gathered some 35+ people for 2 full days to talk about all things passwords. The rest is history.