Do you know that meme of Homer Simpson trying to hide in the bushes? That's how I would feel when my coworkers would discuss asymmetric encryption, certificate signing, salting, and crazy-sounding acronyms like PBKDF2.After years of trying to ignore this problem, I finally decided to do something about it. But rather than digging into the subject via textbooks and pseudo-code, I decided to research the massive amount of functionality that is offered by Node.js' built-in `crypto` module. Then I worked my way backwards to understand what each function does, what underling security best-practice it's based on, and when it's appropriate to use it.So if you're like me then step out of the bushes, and join me in this talk to learn the fundamentals of protecting information in a practical way with Node.js.