About me

Who I am

My name is Uwe Gradenegger. I grew up in Hesse, matured into a professional in Munich and have now settled in Middle Franconia.

I can look back on more than 20 years of professional experience, especially but not only with Microsoft products, and am passionate about IT security.

Over the past decade, I have specialized professionally in public key infrastructures and here in Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services.

From 2013 to 2016 I worked at the Academy of Administration and Business (VWA) Munich completed a degree in computer science business administration (VWA) and successfully graduated with a thesis on the subject of public key infrastructures.

From 2015 to 2020, I was with the Microsoft Germany GmbH in Munich as a Senior Premier Field Engineer Security with a focus on public key infrastructures, where I was able to work with the most high-profile representatives of their profession. This time had a huge impact on me and I am very grateful to Microsoft and my colleagues for this irreplaceable experience.

In 2020, Deutsche Bahn recruited me from Microsoft to refurbish its public key infrastructure. To this day, it benefits enormously from my work and commitment. Over the years, however, I have come to a personal conclusion, no longer Part of this apparatus want to be.

Since 2024, thanks to an absolutely exceptional entrepreneur, I have been back in my element and working together with more highly motivated and renowned experts at m2trust on a holistic solution for the fully automated management of certificates for people, machines and services.

In the social networks I am on LinkedIn and GitHub to be found.

What distinguishes me

In addition to my passion for PKI as a topic, I have extremely high standards for the quality of my work.

My way of working is very structured and I am always interested in finding out why and how something works. This is a point that many instructions on the internet cannot answer.

In addition, my focus is also always on preserving and improving safety. Just because something "kind of" works doesn't mean it makes sense to implement something in a certain way. My approach is holistic and carefully weighs the "for" and "against".

My work is therefore backed up by facts throughout. I love to learn from others. However, I stand by my statements and address problems openly and without mincing my words, even if I sometimes cause offense in the old-school German professional society. HiPPOs and status posturing have no place in IT security; after all, an attacker doesn't care about important-sounding titles.

Why this website?

This website is my personal knowledge database for the topics I have developed around Microsoft PKI and Active Directory security. Originally, it was my dream to publish a reference book on the subject of PKI. In the meantime, my articles have already far exceeded the scope of a specialist book.

Since all this information is potentially of interest to other people and can help to increase the IT security level of companies and authorities as well as protect them from IT security incidents, I provide the information on this website free of charge.

In addition, in this way I would like to arouse interest in this underestimated technology and get others excited about this topic. After all, PKI is a topic of the future, and has been for 50 years.

Please keep in mind while reading that I am only human and - even though I run this project with a lot of effort and commitment - of course I make mistakes here and there. If you find such, have suggestions or comments for me, I am of course very happy about a notification. Please also note that I also regularly revise already published articles, for example if new findings arise.

You find my website helpful and want to support my project?

Did my website help you and would you like to give something back?

• Feel free to link to my posts in your own blog or on social media.
• I am always grateful for feedback on my posts. This can also be corrections, additions or ideas for further content.
• I am also very happy to accept guest posts.
• Pull requests for my open source projects are gladly accepted.
• Would you like to support my work with a donation? Get in touch with me and I will be happy to name a charitable organization that I personally support.
• I am also happy to receive stickers for my laptops ;).