A talk idea + A request for a talk: Cryptography and SSL, a two-parter

[chrisuehlinger]

**Talk Title: ** SSL: How to do the thing.

**Talk Idea, described briefly: ** SSL, certificates, keys and trusts are all scary as heck. A lot of people struggle to get HTTPS set up for their sites, and when it comes to using it for local development, they just give up and click the “Show me this unsafe site” button in Chrome.

But not anymore. I’m going to do a quick review of the weird words of SSL (certificates, signatures, trust stores, etc.) and talk about how you can easily secure your site for free with LetsEncrypt, and make some truly bonkers certs for local development with a little-known but super easy tool called mkcert. Say goodbye to the “Not Secure” URL Badge of Shame. You will never see it again.

However, I feel like it’s much easier to demystify this stuff if the audience has a background in very very basic cryptography. I’d love to present this in collaboration with someone else, who could write a talk about the basics of how private and public keys work, and how in the end all this stuff is just numbers being multiplied or factored into other numbers. Once the audience has a basic understanding of how something like a “public key” could even work, it’ll be much easier to swallow things like “self-signed certificates”.

**Your name: ** Chris Uehlinger

**CCJS Slack username: ** Uehreka

If you're not a member of CCJS slack, sign up here so we can communicate about your talk, if you don't mind: http://charmcityjs.herokuapp.com/

**Twitter username (optional): **

**Estimated Talk Length: (1-15 min please): ** 15 minutes

Availability:
Please check off the dates in which you would be interested in presenting your talk:

• November 6th, 2019
• December 4th, 2019
• (No January Meetup in 2020)
• February 5th, 2020
• March 4th, 2020
• April 1st, 2020
• May 6th, 2020
• June 3rd, 2020
• July 1st, 2020
• August 5th, 2020
• September 2nd, 2020
• October 7th, 2020
• November 4th, 2020
• December 2nd, 2020

[oliikit]

@chrisuehlinger - I can help out with this. I have some old slides on how PGP works, which can be transferable here. Just let me know what you need.

Changelog recently released an episode from Let's Encrypt on their story of creating their own CA and how they were able to do what they're doing. 'twas a good episode.

[asasmith]

@chrisuehlinger @oliikit are either of you still available/interested in giving these talks? If so can you update you're availability please? Thanks!

[oliikit]

(sorry I was terrible at responding with this). @chrisuehlinger - would love to work on this sometime next year. My availability would be around April-June

[chrisuehlinger]

I'd be down, I was thinking of doing it a bit sooner than that (now that I've gotten out all of the WebRTC talks). But I could also squeeze a different talk in between now and late spring if there's still a drought

[oliikit]

I'll let you know if I'm free earlier. I'm switching jobs between January - March, so just might be hard pressed for time.