Three rooms. Hands-on bias. Final list locks in late July.
Paired code-along, in the round. Tutor at the table with you,not in front of you.
A teaching session, thirty years deep. They lecture, they pause, they walk the room.
Production HSMs,opened up, on the bench. Forty-thousand-euro devices in your hands.
The topic is
what you came for.
The room shape is
how it's experienced.
What your hands are doing, where you sit, what your day actually feels like — that's what the room decides. We've matched each session to one of three shapes: a tight horseshoe for paired code-along, a lecture grid for the long view, a hardware bench for the kit you can hold. Topics are still locking in; the shapes are not.
A horseshoe of tables curving around the front of the room — the tutor in the centre, the screen behind them, every attendee facing in. You see each other; the tutor sees all of you. They type, you type. They walk the inside of the curve when something goes red.
A teaching session by someone who has been doing this for thirty years. They lecture, they pause, they walk the room and answer the question you didn't quite want to ask out loud. Computers in the room because the work doesn't stop when the slides do.
A bench at the front loaded with the kit most engineers never see in the flesh — production HSMs, hardware tokens, smart cards, the things that cost more than your car. You walk up, hold one, plug one in, and write code that talks to it. Vendor engineers in the room.
Four rooms. A handful of teachers who've spent careers in code most people never see. One Monday — when you still have a fresh laptop and a fresh brain. The rooms vary: some run a full day, others split into morning and afternoon half-day sessions. The proposal window has closed — the line-up is now set. The conference proper is for the talks. This is the day you take the wheel.
Note for managers: tutorials are a separate paid add-on. The tutors are giving up their Monday to teach — so the main ticket stays affordable, and only people who attend the tutorial pay for it.
A full day inside the BC Java APIs — both the certified (FIPS) and lightweight versions — walked through end-to-end by the engineers who wrote them. Real code on the screen, real code on your laptop, exercises at the end of every session.
Every attendee receives a copy of David Hook's book, Java Cryptography Tools and Techniques — print or electronic. Print copies signed by the author on the day.
The walking lecture. Concepts from the front of the room, then problems on your laptop, then the lecturer at your shoulder when you get stuck. The session most attendees say they remember afterwards.
A teaching session by someone who has been doing this long enough to know which questions are the right ones.
Every attendee is issued a custom Raspberry Pi Pico 2 based hardware token on arrival — yours to keep. In three hours, we clone the firmware, build it from a clean checkout, flash it onto the device, and register it against a public WebAuthn relying party as a hybrid post-quantum passkey — both the classical and the ML-DSA signature halves visible in the CBOR. Post-quantum is the headline; the developer skill the room walks out with is everything around it: cross-compiling Rust to embedded ARM, dropping a microcontroller into bootloader mode, flashing over USB, watching the stack come back up, reading what the browser actually receives.
A working hybrid post-quantum security key in your pocket — flashed by you, signed by both halves of the future.
An in-the-round code-along for downstream library authors. We walk the OpenSSL provider architecture, then build one — register a cipher against libcrypto, implement encrypt/decrypt, and load it into a running binary. Caesar cipher as the worked example (don't use it for anything real; we'll explain why).
You leave with a working provider you wrote, compiled, and loaded yourself.
Five fields, ten minutes.Topic, format, what students leave with.
A 30-min call to size the bench, the kit,and what twenty laptops need to be ready for.
Horseshoe, lecture grid, or hardware bench — whichever fits what your tutorial really is.
Your topic, your room, your day.Honorarium covers travel; the Foundation hosts.
An honorarium covering travel + lodging from anywhere in the world, four nights at the conference hotel, a conference pass for the rest of the week, and a fixed teaching fee set when proposals are accepted. The tutors are giving up their Monday — we don't ask them to pay to be in the room.
Yes — two tutors per bench is common and works well. Name your co-tutor on the proposal. Honoraria are per-person; both names go on the printed bench-sheet.
A talk is 30–60 minutes in a hall — you present, the audience listens, Q&A at the end. A tutorial is a half-day or full-day on the Monday before the conference, capped at ~20 engineers, hands on laptops, you walking the room. If your topic is *"watch and listen"*, it's a talk — see the talks CFP. If your topic is *"open your terminal"*, it's a tutorial.
Yes — emphatically. The tutorials that worked best last year were taught by people who'd never run a workshop before but had shipped the thing they were teaching. We pair first-time tutors with an experienced co-tutor if you'd rather not solo. We also pay for a rehearsal day in Prague the week before, if you want one.
The room comes with: tables, power, hardwired ethernet, a 4K display, a wireless mic, and a tech runner for the first hour. You bring: your laptop and your example code. For the Hardware Bench: we ship in production HSMs / smart cards / tokens to your spec — name your vendor when you propose.
Then we cut the cap — but we still run it. Six people typing with the person who wrote the library is a better day than thirty in a hall. The honorarium doesn't change with attendance. You teach who's there.
Two committee members read your proposal blind. Reading is rolling — propose before 15 July and you'll get a substantive response (yes / no / revise) within ten days, instead of waiting until the window closes. Final decisions are sent by early August at the latest.
This is the day you stop reading the docs and write the code.
Each session is booked individually — €250 quarter day, €500 half day, €1,000 full day. Twenty seats per room, thirty at the code-along. One day, before the conference proper. The room is open.