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PT Philip Tricca On Oxide and Friends

“I'm sure the number of startups out there where their PKI was, you know, an unencrypted key sitting on a thumb drive in someone's desk drawer is probably way more than zero.”

Oxide and Friends · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“I'm sure the number of startups out there where their PKI was, you know, an unencrypted key sitting on a thumb drive in someone's desk drawer is probably way more than zero.” — Philip Tricca, Oxide and Friends

The Oxide hosts were joking about cutting corners on key management "out of expediency." Tricca explains why Oxide set a minimum bar for its hardware root of trust's signing ceremony before shipping its first rack.

Transcript

Oxide and Friends Around 18:34 into the episode
Adam Leventhal

expediency, it's like, look, I attached to you. Out of expediency, just 100%. Yeah.

Bryan Cantrill

I'm attached to an email. It's an email coming from the CEO. Or it's like sitting in like, no, we're going to lock the desk drawer that has this. So I don't know what you guys are so upset about. That

Philip Tricca

was exactly where I was going with this. It's like, I'm sure like the number of startups out there where their PKI was like, you know, an unencrypted key sitting on a thumb drive in someone's desk drawer is probably way more than zero. Way

Bryan Cantrill

more than zero. And I think that this is one of these things where it's like the kind of the lean methodology or, you know, you want to ship like the minimum thing. It's like, well, the minimum, you're going to live with this decision. The whole idea of that kind of the kind of the lean startup…

Philip Tricca

Yeah. And I mean, it's not impossible to create a new PKI. I mean, we can do that from thin air, basically. You're just generating data that becomes an encryption key or a signing key. So, you know, I don't think that, you know, you, you do have to have something on day one. It has to hit some kind…

Bryan Cantrill

So you have this like, oh, shit moment where it's like, we got to build this whole thing, something that we've like depended on. And I mean, this is where you do have, I feel like the more established company experience is super helpful in that we have really high expectations for ourselves because…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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