2026-11-04 –, Room 1 Language: English
A packet-level tour of the TLS family. What stays visible when everything's encrypted? TLS is everywhere, and most people assume that means "encrypted, end of story." But TLS is a family of protocols, and each member leaves a different footprint on the wire. This talk is a tour of that family through Wireshark, built around a single idea: encryption hides content, not behaviour.
TLS is everywhere, and most people assume that means "encrypted, end of story." But TLS isn't one protocol. It's a family, and each member leaves a different footprint on the wire. This talk is a tour of that family through Wireshark, built around a single idea: encryption hides content, not behaviour.
We'll meet the relatives one capture at a time. TLS 1.2 and 1.3, mutual TLS, STARTTLS, EAP-TLS tucked inside your WiFi login, DTLS over UDP, and QUIC reinventing the stack. Each one handles the same trade-off a little differently, and each leaves a different story on the wire. Some give away more than their designers intended. Some look completely opaque until you know where to point Wireshark. One or two may change how comfortable you feel about traffic you'd assumed was private.
The thread running through all of it is what you can still read without any keys at all, and how, as the plaintext shrinks version by version, the things that remain become more diagnostic, not less. We'll finish where the family is heading next: the post-quantum handshake you can already capture in today's browsers, and what it's quietly doing to the very first packet you send.
Katherine is a tech professional with 4 years of experience, having retrained in her 40s to become a Computer Expert, specialising in System Integration. Originally from New Zealand, she is currently based in Germany. During her training, she undertook a practicum at SevenShift, a boutique IoT cybersecurity company in Cologne that recognised her talent and dedication, ultimately hiring her. She is now employed there, where she is honing her skills and contributing to the company's security initiatives. Outside of her professional life, Katherine is a dedicated single mother to a teenager. She is a member of the Haecksen, the FINTA branch of the CCC, and a Chapter Leader of OWASP Cologne.