Presented by: Josh Keller

TLS is a foundational technology for securing communication over the internet. While it is crucial to understand the big ideas behind TLS, the work of generating certificates, getting them signed, and installing them is often abstracted away. These leads to many engineers having a poor grasp of what is actually happening even if they use TLS every day.

In this talk we will:

- Create our own Certificate Authority for self-signing certificates
- Generate a private key and certificate
- Use this certificate on a web server
- Install the CA certificate so our browser will trust our self-signed certificate
- Take a look at how our OS and browser know which certificates to trust

The idea is not that you will do any of these things manually in a production application -- in fact, you probably shouldn't. Instead, you should walk away feeling that TLS is not so mystical and you will have some of the tools to explore certificates and play with them on your own to refine your understanding of this foundational technology.

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