Todd Gardner
I start things.
Lake Elmo, Minnesota, United States
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Todd Gardner is the cofounder of CertKit, TrackJS, and Request Metrics, and a longtime builder of tools that keep things from breaking at 2am. He spends his time on certificate automation, Windows environments that still speak TLS 1.0, and convincing people that 47-day lifetimes are survivable. He takes the work seriously and himself much less so.
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Everything you learned about SSL is deprecated
Remember your first HTTPS server? RSA keys, year+ certificates, and some openssl incantation you copied from StackOverflow. That's all outdated now.
TLS 1.3 threw out decades of cipher complexity. Snowden leaks moved Perfect Forward Secrecy from optional to mandatory. Let's Encrypt made certificates a free API call. And browser vendors are pushing certificate lifetimes down to 47 days.
This talk is a tour of modern ~~SSL~~ TLS. We'll cover what changed, why it changed, and what breaks if you don't make updates.
Surviving 47-Day Certificate Lifetimes with PowerShell
By March 2029, public TLS certificates will live at most 47 days. That is twelve renewals a year for every certificate you own, and renewing by hand stops being an option long before then. To understand why this is happening, and what to do about it, you need to know how public PKI actually works and how badly it's been misbehaving.
The first half of this session is the story of the certificate authorities. The deal we all made with the CAs and how it went wrong, the failures that broke trust, and why the CA/Browser Forum is being forced to shorten lifetimes no matter how much everyone complains.
The second half is what you can do about it with PowerShell, live. We issue and renew a certificate with Posh-ACME, and delegate DNS challenges so validation does not require handing over your whole zone. Then we map what stands between that demo and real automation. Getting renewed certificates onto IIS, Exchange, and the appliances that fight back. Keeping private keys safe. Catching the renewal that silently fails. You will leave with working issuance, a map of the remaining problems, and a fair sense of how much of this lifecycle you want to own yourself.
TLS Changed but Nobody Told Windows
Most of what admins learned about configuring SSL over the past twenty years is now wrong. The cipher suite lists you tuned, the registry keys you flipped, the protocol versions you fought to keep alive for that one old client. It's not even called SSL anymore. TLS 1.3 threw out nearly all of it, forced by twenty years of attacks and exploits.
This session tells that story. We start with how the TLS handshake actually works and what a certificate does inside it. Then we walk the timeline of attacks that broke it, one by one. BEAST, POODLE, FREAK, and Logjam each killed something you were still configuring, and most Windows environments never got updated.
Then we'll audit what your servers actually negotiate with PowerShell, fixing Schannel configuration, deciding which tweaks still matter, and retiring old protocol versions without breaking the clients you forgot about.
Success On Your Own Terms
Are you trapped in the monotonous cycle of completing JIRA tickets, thinking the only way up is management? Let me show you another way. I’ve been a codemonkey, I’ve worked in the cubical mazes of bigcorp, but I got out. It was the scariest thing I ever did—and it totally changed my life.
Consider this session your roadmap. We'll explore freelancing, consulting, and starting software businesses. You'll see the potential roadblocks and how to navigate them. You’ll be empowered with the confidence to venture outside your comfort zone. Are you ready to define your own success? The time is now.
Build vs Buy: Software Systems at Jurassic Park
We were so preoccupied with whether we could, we didn’t stop to think if we should. Nowhere at Jurassic Park was this more true than how we developed software. Having the wrong software and support structures was a key factor in the failures of our first park. We were entrepreneurs launching something new and architects integrating an enterprise. And our decisions had lasting consequences. Deciding which problems were worth our time was foundational to our failure.
Join us for a retrospective of software systems at Jurassic Park. We’ll dig into case studies and explore our successes and failures. We’ll uncover the options, costs, and risks inherent in deciding what software to build, what to buy, and alternatives in between. We’ll explore the opportunity cost of building systems, the sustainability of open-source, and the risks of vendor lock-in. You’ll leave equipped to make better decisions and avoid the pitfalls we made at Jurassic Park.
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