KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

A constant presence in our lives for nearly 25 years, TLS is a cornerstone of modern security practice — especially in a zero-trust world. In cloud native, mTLS comes up every time service meshes get mentioned. Even so, both these technologies are still sources of endless questions. How do they work? How are they related? What problems do they solve – and which others do they not solve? How does it relate to end-user auth? What's all this stuff with certificates anyway? And why should you care about these things? Thankfully, answering these questions isn't that complex. Sandeep Kanabar, Lead Software Engineer at Gen, and Andrew Davis, a Cybersecurity Expert—both Deaf & Hard of Hearing WG members—will discuss what TLS and mTLS are, what they do, how they work, why they matter as standards, and what nearly 25 years of attacking them have to say about security. They'll use Linkerd as an example, but this talk will apply to any situation involving mTLS or TLS, no matter the implementation.