I don't talk at events that often, it's hard to find the right occasion and the time to prepare. This week though, I had an opportunity to visit Scotland for the second time ever, where the Scot-Secure 2023 conference was taking place.

The Conf

It took a while to arrive in Edinburgh through Frankfurt, so I've decided to just rest at the hotel with a few beers and go through the slides one last time.

The next day I arrived at the Dynamic Earth venue, a large white tent near the stunning views of Salisbury Crags. As soon as you enter, you feel that the event is organized carefully and despite it being fully booked, it wasn't uncomfortably crowded. After browsing through the sea of vendors, we went downstairs where the talks started - Lego and a few other companies kicked it off. Later it was also interesting to hear Vangelis Stykas talk about his real-life API hacking adventures. One presentation that stood out what Gwen Diagram's "Bringing the Party to Security" - it brought some colors and positivity to the conference and I really enjoyed how Gwen delivered it.

The common theme of the talks, at least a few of them, was: the technology is great, but let's not forget to focus on people as well!

The Talk

In the afternoon it was me and Leo Cunningham on stage. While Leo covered the feature itself and the business case for it, I presented my journey as a security engineer while Flo created the Anonymous Mode - from the start to the release. I talked about the security challenges and lessons learned throughout the creation process of the Anonymous Mode. OHTTP seems to have been a new topic for most folks, as it was for me a year ago, so it seems the talk was interesting and useful. Most importantly though, I think people picked up on the message that with the right determination, it's possible to implement a feature like this which improves privacy. More technical folks got some new topics to research, which was one of my talk goals.

The talk was well documented by DIGIT's Michael Edgar here.

Thank Ye!

Scotland is a truly beautiful country and it was nice to meet and chat with new people. Thanks to the organizers for pulling off such a well-organized event and for the opportunity to talk.

I got back home the next day at midnight (landing at foggy VNO airport), but the travel was totally worth it.