What are certificates?

[Please note the different venue than usual]

Abstract: You may have heard of certificates before, and know they have something to do with HTTPS, but what actually are they? This talk dives deep into what certificates actually do for us, how they're used, who uses them, and different ways you can get a certificate (and how to revoke them!). We will also touch on some more advanced topics that are appearing on the modern web, such as Certificate Transparency, Certificate Stapling and auto-renewing certificates with the help of ACME!

This talk is aimed at beginner level web developers, and assumes a basic knowledge of how web applications work. However there will be content that even seasoned web developers might learn from, so hopefully everyone will get something out of it!

Bio: Matt Cotterell is a Security Engineer and a .NET Developer with 5+ years professional experience in software engineering for various diverse industries, including healthcare, cinema management and journalism. He is more of a maker than a breaker and spends his time exploring various software frameworks and public cloud providers (particularly .NET and Azure) along with writing software and presentations that enable developers to secure these systems.

He is currently working for Stuff Limited (https://www.stuff.co.nz) helping the DevOps teams improve the general security posture of their software and systems architecture, and developing awareness training for the in-house development teams. In his spare time, he can be found watching bad movies, gleefully overusing the word "cyber", and feeling awkward about writing biographies in a third-person perspective.

Please arrive at 5:45pm for snacks and a 6pm start.