Mon Aug 10, 2015
James Kasten, Peter Eckersley and I gave a talk at DEF CON this year about the Let’s Encrypt project. There is no recording yet, but you can get off the edge of your seat now, because here are the slides [pdf] that the world has been waiting for with bated breath.
Given that we practiced for a total of 30 minutes and worked on slides until we were whisked onstage, the talk went pretttttty smoothly. In particular, James’ live demo of a certificate issuance and rollback on a parody enterprise website ~stole the show. My one-take documentary about innocent people who can’t figure out how to get an SSL certificate was also met with great acclaim, especially for the phenomenal cinematography (“A cross between The Blair Witch Project, Spinal Tap, and a Windows 95 home setup instruction video.”):
Unfortunately, we were in one of the smaller DEF CON rooms, so the majority of people who waited in line for the talk didn’t get to see it, and the ones who did get to see it became very close to each other (emotionally as well as physically, I hope).
the people who didn’t want to encrypt were forcibly removed from the room
45 minutes later, we were glad to be done and finally free to enjoy the rest of the conference!
peter, me, and james looking pretty psyched
… which we did by scrambling over to Dan Kaminsky’s talk on clickjacking prevention. Afterwards, we rescued Dan from his hordes of manic fans by inviting him to dinner.
peter and dan sure are happy to be done with their talks!
After dinner, I walked around a bunch with my favorite DEF CON 23 car hacker Samy (no offense to Charlie Miller, Chris Valasek, Marc Rogers, Kevin Mahaffey, and all of Car Hacking Village tho!). All the villages were closed, but luckily the Silent Circle booth in the vendor room was poppin’.
we made a silent Silent Circle circle
I was supposed to head to the airport shortly after, but I was having such an unexpectedly great time at DEF CON that I changed my flight.
After 3.5 energy drinks and an all-nighter, I ended up in a cigarrette-smoke-infested $2 hot-dog stand on the far side of dawn. Then I hailed a cab to the airport before collapsing in a heap of exhaustion.
I’m pretty darn sad that DEF CON is over – it was a fantastic time, I met lots of cool people, and all 3 talks I attended inspired me to hack on something new. Too bad talk recordings aren’t online yet, but fortunately Travis Goodspeed left me with some good ol’ fashioned bedtime reading.
PS – working on some new hacks. Hopefully more blog posts soon after catching up on sleep.