The WiFi Certificate That Didn't Exist an Hour Ago

My laptop is on WiFi right now on a certificate that didn&rsquo;t exist an hour ago. I made the keypair, my own CA signed it, the private key went into my secret store, and the machine authenticated onto the 802.1X network and pulled a DHCP lease — all through code I&rsquo;d finished writing about twenty minutes earlier. I want to talk about the boring part that made it safe, because the boring…