Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
What is uPKI?
While web browsers automatically check if an HTTPS certificate has been revoked, other Linux command-line tools and applications usually skip this check. That leaves applications vulnerable to compromised or misissued certificates many months after this is discovered. In their talk, Joe Birr-Pixton and Dirkjan Ochtman will be introducing uPKI: a new effort to bring browser-grade certificate infrastructure to Linux. This effort is funded by Canonical, engineered by the maintainers of rustls, and builds on foundational work from Mozilla.
About Dirkjan
Dirkjan Ochtman is a professional Rust maintainer, active on projects like rustls, Hickory DNS and Quinn. He lives in the Netherlands with his family.
About Joe
Joe Birr-Pixton is a security engineer. He has formerly worked with Twilio, Electric Imp, BlackBerry, Good Technology, Thales, and nCipher. These days, Joe mostly works in Rust, but his professional experience is in C and C++. He is the original author of the “rustls” crate, which provides TLS support to most of the Rust ecosystem.
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What is uPKI?
While web browsers automatically check if an HTTPS certificate has been revoked, other Linux command-line tools and applications usually skip this check. That leaves applications vulnerable to compromised or misissued certificates many months after this is discovered. In their talk, Joe Birr-Pixton and Dirkjan Ochtman will be introducing uPKI: a new effort to bring browser-grade certificate infrastructure to Linux. This effort is funded by Canonical, engineered by the maintainers of rustls, and builds on foundational work from Mozilla.
About Dirkjan
Dirkjan Ochtman is a professional Rust maintainer, active on projects like rustls, Hickory DNS and Quinn. He lives in the Netherlands with his family.
About Joe
Joe Birr-Pixton is a security engineer. He has formerly worked with Twilio, Electric Imp, BlackBerry, Good Technology, Thales, and nCipher. These days, Joe mostly works in Rust, but his professional experience is in C and C++. He is the original author of the “rustls” crate, which provides TLS support to most of the Rust ecosystem.
🌍 Ubuntu Summit 26.04 is a showcase for the innovative and the ambitious.
Find out more: ubuntu.com/summit
📍Subscribe. Fuel your curiosity.
youtube.com/UbuntuOS
