Stay With Me, this is Going to Get Quantum Weird

 This was originally posted on the Canadian Cybersecurity Network's CyberVoices page: Stay With Me, this is Going to Get Quantum Weird 

CyberVoices is well worth a look if you want to get a sense of cybersecurity in Canada from many different perspectives in 2024. It gets you away from the goverment / business / marketing talk about cyber which tends to contain a lot of self-interested spin.

Canadian Cybersecurity Network's CYBERVOICES.

***

Science and technology were making great strides at the end of the nineteenth century, to the point where we were beginning to discover problems with the reality we thought we lived in. Newtonian physics does a great job of describing what we see around us, but it turns out this is an illusion created by the scale at which we operate. It’s like thinking the earth is flat because it looks that way, but it only looks that way because we’re not big enough to see it; reality is in the eye of the beholder.

What we discovered as we looked closer with better technology was that the universe isn’t a deterministic machine. The double slit experiment caused great confusion because it looked like light was both a wave and a particle. Rutherford’s gold foil experiment suggested that the recently discovered atom was almost entirely empty space. Most of what you breathe in is vacuum! The universe is much stranger than we first thought, and it isn’t deterministic at all, but very much probabilistic. Einstein hated this ‘spooky action at a distance’ quantum nonsense, but through the 20^th Century we’ve come to understand that this is how the universe works.  Most people don’t know this because education finds teaching science in a Newtonian way easier. Professor Brian Cox has a good quote in his book, The Quantum Universe: “It’s not Newton for big things and quantum for small things, it’s quantum all the way.”

This emerging quantum awareness created the first quantum revolution. Once we recognized that quantum effects happen around us all the time, we started designing technology that made use of these newly discovered natural phenomena. If you think this is only for exotic university labs, you’re wrong. The flash memory that you’re likely reading this through depends on quantum tunnelling to work, as do lasers, MRIs and super conductors.

So, what’s all this talk about quantum computing and what the heck does this have to do with cybersecurity? In the 1970s many researchers started theorizing about quantum computing and Richard Feynman put it together in the early 80s, then the race was on to build the theory. What’s the difference between this and passive 20^th Century quantum technology? We’ve developed the technology and theory now to engineer quantum outcomes rather than just using what nature gives us. As you might imagine, this is incredibly difficult.

I had an intense chat with Dr. Shohini Ghose, the CTO of the Quantum Algorithms Institute at the end of our quantum cybersecurity readiness training day this week in BC. She was (quite rightly) adamant that we can’t know quantum details without observing them and when we observe them, we change them, but my philosophy background has me thinking that I’m going to try anyway. An unobserved universe is entirely probabilistic. It only becomes the reality we see when we perceive it. It reminds me of the crying angels in my favourite Doctor Who episode. This bakes most people’s noodles, but the math clearly indicates that in measuring a photon’s location we can’t also know its velocity and direction – that’s the uncertainty principle in action. I’m probably wrong about all of that, but I’d rather people take a swing at understanding this strangeness rather than being afraid of being wrong.

Alright, we’re halfway through this thing and you haven’t mentioned anything cyber once! If you think about the electronic systems we use, they’re entirely Newtonian. They reduce information to ones and zeroes and produce the kind of certainty we all like, but this is a low-resolution approach that is about to hit its limit. We’re building transistors so small now that electrons are tunnelling through the nanometer thick walls (atoms are mainly empty space, remember?) between transistors, rendering future miniaturization impossible; we’re nearing the limits of our Newtonian illusion. That means the end of Moore’s Law! Panic in the disco!

Quantum computers don’t use electronics as a common base. A quantum computer processor might be ionized particles, or photons, or nanotech engineered superconductors, and those are just a few of the options. By isolating these tiny pieces of the cosmos away from the chaos of creation and applying energy to them in incredibly intricate ways, we can create probability engines that use astonishing mathematics to calculate solutions to problems that linear electronic machines could never touch, but unlike classic computers we need to do this without observing the process or all is lost. Imagine if you had to design the first microprocessors in the dark and you’re a fraction of the way towards understanding how difficult it is to build a quantum computer, but it’s happening!

We’re currently in what’s called the NISQ (noisy intermediate scale quantum) computing stage. We’re still struggling with applying just enough energy to get a particle to polarize how we want it to, all while keeping the noise (heat, radiation) of reality out. That’s why you see quantum computers in those big cylinders as a chandelier. The cylinders are radiation shields and containers to cool everything down to near absolute zero (gotta keep that thermal noise out), and the chandelier is to keep the electronic noise of the control systems (old school electronics) away from the quantum processor.

My favourite quote from the PhDs I’ve talked to is, “a viable quantum computer is five years out. And if I’m wrong, it’s four years.” What does that mean for ICT types? Quantum computers don’t do linear. When you give them a problem, they leverage that state of being everywhere at once to produce massively parallel computing outcomes completely foreign to what we’re familiar with in our multi-core processors. Quantum algorithms are designed to blackbox the calculation, so observation doesn’t spoil quantum processes and then spit out answers as probabilities.

What does that mean for cybersecurity? Peter Shor came up with an elegant idea in the mid-90s that uses a Quantum Fourier Transformation to calculate the periodicity in prime number factoring. If you can calculate the period of two large, factored primes (there is a repeating pattern), you can reverse engineer those primes. In RSA encryption or anything else that uses factoring you could calculate the private key and tear apart the encrypted transport layer handshakes rendering secure internet traffic a thing of the past. From there you could imitate banks or governments or simply decrypt traffic without anyone knowing you’re there. You won’t see cybercriminals doing this because the tech’s too tough, but nation states will, though you won’t see them either because they will be quietly collecting all of that encrypted online data Imitation Game style. This process may already have begun with harvest now, decrypt later (HNDL).

There is much more to quantum technologies in cybersecurity than the encryption panic though. Recent research suggests that instead of running into limits with electron tunnelling in transistors, our new quantum 2.0 engineering could leverage this quantum effect to create Qtransistors magnitudes smaller and much faster than what we have now. Cybersecurity will have to integrate that technology as it evolves. Quantum communication is another challenge. NIST is making mathematical quantum resistant algorithms as I type this, but you could also leverage quantum entanglement itself to create quantum key encryption. China has an entire network of satellites testing these hack proof comms links now. There could be quantum locked portions of the internet in 15 years where high security traffic goes. Guess who is going to have to manage those secure networks.

If you’re in cybersecurity there is much more to quantum than panicking about encryption. Anyone in the field would be well served by digging in and researching this fascinating technological emergence. My colleague, Louise Turner, and I presented at the Atlantic Security Convention on this in April. Give our presentation a look. There are lots of links to fascinating resources. It’s time to free your mind, Neo.

Little Cyber Skills Bonfires Across Canada

 It's been one of those months when possibilities for the future keep going in and out of focus. My secondment ends in August. There might be a possibility of an extension, but there are questions around whether or not I'm allowed to do it contractually. There are also questions around whether or not I want to go back into the classroom at all. Here are some of the things that have happened in the past few weeks that have me up at 5am after a14+ hour work day that should have knocked me out for a full night of sleep...

I did a ten day run across the Maritimes a couple of weeks ago. This involved a teacher PD day in Nova Scotia on a Saturday and then in class enhanced technology training days in schools across New Brunswick which mainly focused on trying to leverage the national CyberTitan cyber range competition images from previous years with students with varying backgrounds in cybersecurity. This isn't edtech as you know it, it's leading edge technology being leveraged to teach complex, interdisciplinary ideas that we can't usually get anywhere near in the classroom.

The first day in Fredericton was frustrating due to technical difficulties and pedagogical challenges. Using state of the art cloud based cyber range simulations is always going to be a stretch in classrooms. Doing it on the IT infrastructure in schools is like trying to drive a Formula One car on a dirt road. The range of student skill made it impossible to sufficiently differentiate in order to land everyone in Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and technical issues only complicated matters further. I finished the day exhausted and frustrated.

Day two completely restored my faith in this experiment. Oromocto High School has a brilliant computer technology instructor who has built a strong community of CyberTitans and the computer lab we were in was fit for purpose. We had a great day on the range where I got to see students grasp concepts that even CyberPatriot can't address due to it's old-school desktop virtual machine approach. On top of that I learned I am not alone! Blair, who runs the program at OHS is also Cyber Operations qualified, making us the only two I know of in Canada. Teachers like to invent their own certifications (and degrees) for education technology rather than explore relevance with what everyone else is doing, so it was nice to meet another willing to take on the challenge of a globally recognized industry cert.

Over the week I got to iterate with schools with little to no CyberTitan experience and even a middle school. There are edge cases around exceptional teachers where this kind of enhanced learning is not only possible but essential if we're to develop students capable of surviving the very technologically disruptive future we all face. One of my key takeaways in that week was to emphasize the importance of tending to these unicorns, they are few and far between.

I wrapped up the trip in Charlottetown where our local partner and I had a great chat with CBC radio about how to build genuine cyber-fluency. This is like starting a fire with wet wood. It takes skill, determination and collaboration to make it work, and none of these things are easily found in Canadian education. Having now taught in classrooms from BC to Newfoundland, I've been fortunate enough to experience the wildly inconsistent landscape of Canadian education (there is no such thing, we are the only developed country in the world without a national educaiton strategy), but there are commonalities, like the staggering lack of digital skills we graduate students with. Nurturing local expertise is a way to scale this up. I hope administrators from coast to coast recognize and focus on that.

I finally cracked the TV egg and found myself on CBC Compass. The final question there was a big one, but I stand by my answer: we need to be teaching meaningful digital literacy so that our students can operate safely and effectively in an increasingly technology dependant world. We indeed face global challenges that threaten our future. If we don't start learning the tools at our disposal effectively, we're not going to solve them.

The frozen sea on an empty PEI shore...

International Cyber Cooperation: Reflections on the GFCE & GC3B

I first experienced the frustration inherent in Canada's approach to cybersecurity education last year at the University of Waterloo's CPI conference. There Charles Finlay from the CyberCatalyst talked about how other smaller countries focus on a collaborative approach to cybersecurity that creates a coherent ecosystem of partners who support rather than compete against each other. In the asymmetrical world of cybersecurity where attackers have every advantage in terms of anonymity, it isn't just criminal organizations working the dark end of the internet in 2023, it's authoritarian nation states with fully developed offensive cyber operations. Without collaboration, democracies will dissolve in the chaos of our networked world.

We have the resources,
cooperation is what's missing.

In the year since I've been working to establish connections between the many entities in Canada's cybersecurity industry intent on education and career pathways illumination, but what I've found are siloed organizations (private, public and NFP) fixated on IP and market share whose idea of collaboration is creating partnerships to defeat what they perceive as competition. This isn't collaboration so much as it's combining resources to compete more effectively.

This monopolistic approach is partly the result of how Canada funds cyber-education and industry awareness. By creating competition for funding, potential collaborators are turned into competitors and the possibility of mutual support becomes impossible. A great example are all the competing networks, alliances, consortiums, catalysts and councils - all of whom claim to be creating a collaborative ecosystem under their leadership. Finding funding and piling onto this chaos seems to be the way in Canada. This has been a great frustration and a repeating theme on Dusty World over the past year:

Creating A Canadian Cybersecurity Ecosystem (Oct '22)

How Cybersecurity Might Become More Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive (Dec '22)

Why Canadian Education is so Reluctant to Move on Digital Literacy (Feb '23)

You Want to Teach WHAT?!? Reconfiguring Technology in Schools to Empower Pedagogy (Oct '23)

Cyber Education in Canada is Broken, Here's How to Fix It (Nov '23)

***

The majority of attacks are US focused, but if
you consider Canada has 1/10th the people, we
actually face similar numbers of attacks per capita.

One of the ways I've escaped Canada's siloed approach to, well, pretty much everything, is to look internationally for organizations interested in working collaboratively on the cyber-problem. That would be the one where we put all our critical infrastructure onto a global network that was never designed to be secure and then struggle with wave after wave of increasingly automated cyber-attacks in an environment where the attack surface has become impossibly complicated post COVID.

I started by looking at the World Economic Forum's review of the new US Cyber-Strategy, which is focusing on protecting critical infrastructure and improving collaboration both domestically and internationally to create more effective cyber-defences. Canada's strategy is designed to encourage competition rather than collaboration and has resulted in our being one of the most targeted countries globally. 

The US strategy seems to be aware of this North American predilection for relentless market dominance fixated competition and is attempting to put resources into a collaborative mindset. That approach became apparent when I attended the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building this fall.

***

Through looking into WEF and the UN I came across the Global Forum for Cybersecurity Excellence (GFCE). In June I pitched this proposal on helping cybersecurity practitioners become aware of the coming threats to encryption that quantum computing brings: GFCE Proposal - Cybersecurity in the Age of Quantum Advantage.docx. The elevator pitch is: quantum computing will break most of the encryption standards we depend on for everything from our online financial systems to military communications in the next decade, and likely much sooner.

The GFCE got back to me and said they felt that quantum awareness was an important piece of the puzzle and a good fit with their Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building (GC3B) happening in Accra, Ghana at the end of November. They invited me to develop the research and present it at the event. I'm currently seconded with both ICTC working on cyber-education outreach and the Quantum Algorithms Institute developing education for quantum readiness. QAI supported this research and I got in touch with Louise Turner, a former student now in the inaugural cohort of cybersecurity at Queens University, and she and I put the paper together.

While doing two jobs I beavered away on the paper in the background and Louise (who was juggling her third year course load) and I managed to get the paper in on time. While all that was going on we were both jumping through the hoops in terms of visas and medical requirements to take what would be both of our first trips to Africa.

It all came together at the end of November and we found ourselves at Pearson Airport in Toronto getting on a plane to Washington and then across the Atlantic to Accra. The entire process felt insurmountable, but I've found that if you chip away at seemingly monumental projects like this you get the pieces in place - just don't expect it to happen all at once and pace yourself.

A particular frustration was all the dead ends I chased in terms of finding support for both the research and going to the event itself. I was disappointed to not get support from organizations I have long relationships with who claim to champion just this sort of digital engagement. I went out of my way to attend academic events, but when I asked those organizations about support I found the doors firmly closed. Every form of federal support is safely locked to academic partnerships in a way that makes it impossible for anyone but an internal PhD to claim them; those Canadian silos are exceptionally good at taking care of themselves. I talked to many professors in a multitude of schools but they all disappeared back into their funded, tenured worlds after making noises about how important this kind of work is. That's ok, we did it ourselves.

***

It was snaining in Toronto when we left, but on the ground in Ghana after 12 hours of misery in a middle seat next to the only guy bigger than me on the plane (why don't airlines use smart tech to arrange seating better?), we found ourselves on the ground in Africa! The VISA support by the Ghanese government had been spectacular in Canada and the hospitality was just as special at the Accra Airport. A senior military officer ushered us through customs in seconds and out to the GC3B desk where we got connected to our hotel and suddenly found ourselves tearing through Accra traffic, stunned by the sights and sounds... and heat (Accra is only 600kms north of the equator)!

 

The conference flags were all around the city. From our anonymity in Canada, we suddenly found ourselves at a very welcoming international event.

The Accra City Hotel was where we'd been put up for the conference and was only a ten minute drive from the very fancy Kempinski Hotel where the conference was taking place. We had lunch and then collapsed in our rooms for the afternoon after over 24 hours on the road.

The week before we'd built a powerpoint: QAI GFCE cyber in the age of quantum research presentation.pptx that was designed to gently introduce cybersecurity policy and technical practitioners to quantum computing. We went over it after our afternoon naps on the pool deck in the sweltering heat and humidity of an Accra evening. Louise helped pioneer women in cybersecurity in our school back in 2018/19 when she was in grade 10 and I've known her ever since, so we knew each other's strengths and felt ready to go with the presentation the next morning. That night we had a fantastic Ghanan buffet and then hit the hay.

Since we were presenting on the periphery of the main conference we got to meet the Global Forum for Cyber Excellence working groups who were the organizers of the research presentations. This gave us 'behind the scenes' access to the conference before the main event kicked off the next day. It quickly became apparent that the research presentations needed more time to do them justice. We heard from researchers from all over the world studying everything from regionally specific cyber challenges to international projects on how cyber is presented in the media - to call it fascinating would be an understatement.

Louise and I stepped up for our presentation and knocked it out of the park. We'd de-tuned the technical details (Louise was happy to get into explaining how lattice based mathematical encryption actually works), but the GFCE was keen to focus on making it an introduction to quantum computing and how it will change cyber practices in the next few years. My being a teacher was considered a benefit in introducing this technology which is often obscured by academics fixating on its technical complexities. To ensure equitable access we focused on ensuring the paper only included publicly available research that would assist readers in further exploring the technology. This is an area where Canada excels - putting publicly available material online for anyone in the world to access, so we made good use of the many Canadian cyber and quantum resources available.

We must have done well because we were the only presentation who was asked questions by the reviewer and we ended up late to lunch because we had a line of attendees wanting to ask further questions. There is a lot of curiosity out there around quantum technologies but not a lot of people developing accessible education for the public. As a result it tends to be an academically isolated subject.

Our reviewer kept referring to me as Doctor King during her analysis of our paper, but I've always been interested in how technology becomes applied rather than working on the academic/theoretical side of things. Applied technology use has been my focus since I migrated decades old paper based engineering paperwork onto Lotus123 back in 1991. I was happy to use my blue collar technician's approach to putting a pin in the idea that you need a PhD to understand quantum computing. When it comes to the technologies that so influence our lives (as quantum certainly will), I think everyone deserves to understand how they work.

The rest of that first day at the Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building was fascinating because it wasn't really about the conference, but instead about the mechanics of the GFCE. By the time we were heading back to the hotel I felt like I'd found my tribe and was determined to see what else I could do with them. This was the collaboration and mutually supportive approach to cyber that I'd been missing.

We wrapped up day one feeling the burn. I've never felt so good jumping into a pool after a day of sweating through a suit. While in the water I bumped into one of Nigeria's cybersecurity leaders and we had a nice chat while watching the sun go down.

The next morning we were up again at midnight our time for a 6am start, and on our way to the Kempinski for the opening of the main event. The conference had swollen in size since we'd seen early setup the day before. Instead of a hundred of so people, over 800 were coming in from over 100 different countries, all intent on seeing how we might work together to make digital transformation more equitable and accessible.

I use Twitter as a way to bookmark ideas and resources so I can find them later when I'm building one of these blog posts. My feed from the conference probably tells the story better than a summary here, but to say it was engaging and eye opening would be underselling it. The GC3B worked every angle from policy and diplomacy to technical cooperation and regional partnerships all the way through to international collaboration. It changed the way I see cybersecurity because it moved me beyond the veiled, siloed and somewhat paranoid world of Canadian cyber.

At the end of the second day we were bused over to the park where Ghana's first president is interred for an end of conference dinner. Like everything else that week, it fundamentally challenged my preconceptions. If indigenous people had overthrown European colonization and established their own representative democracy in the wake of that oppression in Canada, that's where Ghana is today. The story of Kwame Nkrumah and his efforts to awaken a pan-African culture were fascinating, especially from the perspective of someone living in a resource consumption focused culture where we continue to struggle with our colonial past.

Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra - well worth a visit.

On the bus ride over (which was an adventure in itself - African commuter buses have drop down seats so the bus is shoulder to shoulder in every row without an exit aisle), I was at a loss to understand how we appeared to be the only Canadians at an international conference where over 100 countries were in attendance. The US State Department had helped fund the event, as had the EU, and we'd met Australians and many other Commonwealth nationalities, but not a single Canadian. The Australian told us about how her government's local office had picked her up at the airport, taken her out for lunch and made sure she was OK at her hotel. Ours sent us a PDF of things to do in Accra.

All of this prompted me ask the Swede sitting next to me how Canada is seen in the international community. I'd honestly expected to hear nice things and assumed we'd simply not been involved in all the clandestine activities of our government at this event, but that's not what came out. The Swede described Canadian participation in world cyber cooperation to be 'selfish and minimalist', which came as a shock despite what I'd observed (it's a teacher survival mechanism to ignore the worst and assume it's my misunderstanding). The Estonian in front of us chipped in with, "I think Canada asks what the minimum is to look like they are involved in a project, give it and then that's the last we hear from them." Attendees from a dozen other countries all nodded in agreement. I did the most Canadian thing imaginable and apologized for my government and all the organizations that are funded by it - even though they'd all ignored my own requests for support prior to the event.

A wonderful evening with people looking to change the world for the better. Ghana knows how to put on a party too...

***

As I floated into the pool later that night pondering how I'm going to dress for the final day of the conference with a suit jacket soaked through with sweat (I went with just a shirt for the final day), I found that I wasn't cowed by what seems to be an insurmountable cultural problem we face as a country. Internally we have the resources and education to make cybersecurity a viable pathway. Canada should be poised to help solve the world's cyber-skills shortage, but instead our plan is to (as it has been in so many other cases) take that talent from other places that need it for our own ends, and do as little as possible to support international cyber development to ensure an equitable digital transformation for all.

I'm a fan of Paul Theroux's travel books. His trip across Oceania ends in Hawaii where he stays at one of the top resorts that is staggeringly expensive. Over the week he finds it coddling and restful, but he comes to the conclusion that when people have money, they mainly use it to keep other people away. The fancy resort provided privacy and a lack of bother from others - that was its main purpose and where the money got spent. Canada is a wealthy country and it seems we use our wealth in much the same way, to isolate ourselves from others. It's not very flattering.

Over 100 countries in attendance. Didn't see a single Canadian in any of the dozens of presentations and none were presenting. I know for a fact that Canada has some of the top cybersecurity practitioners on the planet, but they don't like to share?

***

I arrived at the last day of the conference with a head full of thoughts. This lack of engagement by my country (at least in person, evidently Canada was one of the first to endorse the Accra Call) suggested that the lack of cooperation I see domestically is reflected in our international engagement too. My background and interest is in educational engagement with cybersecurity and other emerging technologies that I feel are essential to students making smart decisions about their futures, so to end the conference I attended Session 4.26: Thinking out of the box to inspire a new generation of cybersecurity talent:

  

You might not have watched that video, but this sort of brainstorming and mutual support is just what we need if we're going to produce a cybersecure future. This doesn't happen behind closed doors or at a distance. I hear a lot of Canadians talking about the Canadian government as though it's distinct from them. This cool distance creates problems with how Canadians understand their own country and their role in it, but it also freezes out possibilities for international collaboration which must be about more than sending money.

I had a great chat in that session on developing cyber talent with a young man from Ghana who had started off as a hacker before coming over to the defenders. He described that journey, especially in a place where you can't drink the water and social services are often non-existent, as difficult because the payouts for being a bad guy are always going to be better. To hear people who are living in what Canadians would consider poverty talking about how they can work together to create equitable digital transformation that will improve standards of living for all was inspiring. You'd have to be the worst kid of self-serving bureaucratic robot to think otherwise.

***

On the final morning we reconvened at the Kempinski and ended the conference with many promises of future work together. It was inspiring and I couldn't help but get a bit teary, especially when they included the presentation awards for Ghana's Student National Cybersecurity Competition...

An all-female team won Ghana's student cybersecurity challenge! 

Having been deeply involved in Canada's student cybersecurity competition since its inception, I was interested to see this presentation. Some stats for comparison:

Ghana has 475 high schools, 50 participated in the national student cybersecurity competition, that's an 11% participation rate. You might think that low but Canada is currently at 0.6% of high schools participating nationally in CyberTitan which has been running for six years (the Ghanan CCS is in its third year). The siloed nature of Canada's regionalized education system (we are the only developed country in the world without a national education strategy) has a lot to do with that.

An all-girl team won the 2023 edition of their SCC. No all-girl team in Canada has ever come close, which makes for an interesting comparison on access to STEM education opportunities between the two countries. If money is used to keep people at a distance, male dominance in cybersecurity is certainly operating along similar lines in Canada. There is much to do in terms of gender equity in the Canadian tech ecosystem.

There were two ministers and other members of parliament at the awards celebration for these students. No member of Canadian parliament, minister or not, has ever attended CyberTitan nationals. Another example of our remote/arms-length governing? At the very least it highlighted the lack of value we seem to place on securing our critical infrastructure in a digital future that will increasingly depend upon cyber skills.

***

On the long plane ride home I was reflective. Was it easy doing this thing? Not at all. I spent a lot of time talking myself out of it for various reasons, and burned a lot of cycles trying (unsuccessfully) to find support to get myself and others to it. Without Louise coming on and helping carry the research load I think I may well have talked myself out of going, and what a shame that would have been.

Winnie knows how it feels. Whoever is doing Xmas
decorating at Dulles is a bit... chaotic in their approach,
but I like it!

Doing the research outside of my regular working hours wasn't easy, and managing the many logistical requirements both medical and paperwork wise was also a heavy load to carry, but it's these extras that I always get the most out of in my work. If you look at my LinkedIn you won't see me bragging about the work I'm paid to do, but rather the projects I chase beyond those expectations. At the end of the day I'm mission driven. After twenty-years in the classroom and building one of the most successful digital skilling programs in Canada in the most unlikely of places, I want to take what I've learned and spark opportunities like that nationally so more Canadian students can access emerging technologies and make informed decisions about where to go next. That this is a struggle continues to baffle me, but I'm committed to climbing that mountain.

Regrets? None. This wasn't easy but that's exactly why we need people to put the work in and make this sort of connection happen. Am I frustrated by Canada's approach? Yes, but that too is a challenge, and one that we will overcome with vision and determination. With a renewed commitment we will see a meaningful Canadian presence at the next Global Conference on Cyber Capacity Building taking place in Geneva in two years. I intend to be working with the GFCE by then in their education working group if not elsewhere in the organization. I hope I can bring more Canadians into it too.

What You Need To Work in Cybersecurity: the secret sauce

I see a lot of rules based 'quick fix' learning opportunities in cybersecurity. These are usually boot camp style condensed programs that promise to turn an accounting or science student into a cybersecurity practitioner in a single semester by showing them how to use tools in a formulaic manner. They treat cybersecurity as though it's an office job: we show you the cybersecurity rules and you follow them. You can see how well this is working by the ongoing shortage Canada faces in finding and retaining cybersecurity professionals.

I got into cybersecurity with my students in 2017 when we started chasing CyberTitan, but I brought something with us that is atypical in the world of STEM: a willingness to hack. I don't like the word hack, it has negative connotations to it in English that have been encouraged by the self appointed masters of STEM (the S&M part), but that willingness to iterate and work outside expected outcomes is the secret sauce in cybersecurity that many ignore, and a major reason for why I've taken to it like I have.

'Necessity is the mother of invention' has been the motivating factor in my relationship with technology since the beginning. I moved quickly from off-the-shelf to customized solutions based on experimentation and need. Within six months of owning my first home computer (a VIC20), I'd figured out how to copy software using a sufficiently low noise audio deck. My first x86 PC was purchased but quickly modified as I came to need more memory and processing power. By the mid-90s I was building my own computers at a time when many people didn't own one.

This process was initially powered by curiosity, which many training programs eclipse with a promise to provide the initiative so you don't have to - something that has never appealed to me and a major reason why I didn't start collecting technical certifications until 2001 (I'd been working in IT for a decade at that point). Schools are bad at nurturing enthusiasm for self-exploration too. Many educators feel that it is their job to impart knowledge in a regimented format (that's why we call them disciplines!) and assess student understanding through a system of providing both the questions and the answers to minimize any frustration. Assessment success is often a measure of compliance rather than cultivating enthusiasm and curiosity.  Many in education call this approach rigorous and disciplined - it's how they demonstrate credibility, and a reason why I haven't continued pursuing academia.

Indians have a term for austere innovation: jugaad (non-conventional, frugal innovation) which doesn't have the pejorative connotations of the English 'hack'. Jugaad celebrates common sense with a solutions focused approach to creative problem solving without needless bureaucracy. It emphasizes an applied approach to making technology work that is especially needed in an industry like cybersecurity where practitioners are often facing edge cases that the people who designed the network never thought of (which is why we're having a cyber problem). WIRED recently did an article on a Ukrainian technologist who demonstrated this start-up/rapid response approach in the war with Russia. There is even an event in cyber that is all about extreme edge cases: the dreaded zero day vulnerability. Jugaad will get you much further than any amount of system think during a zero day attack.

Kintsugi has played a part in my motorcycling.

There is also a term in Japanese that takes the derision found in English out of making old things work. I've long enjoyed the concept of 'kintsugi' or 'golden joinery', which is the repairing of old things using gold to embellish the fix rather than trying to hide it. In typical Japanese fashion it raises what is seen as banal work in the West to an artform. A concept that combines jugaad's celebration of a fix beyond rules based approaches with kintsugi's raising of that fix to an artform is where a good candidate for work in cybersecurity should find themselves inspired. When I started in cyber I found my  IT background helped in terms of understanding the mechanics of what was happening, but my kintsugi powered jugaad approach is what has allowed me to thrive.

This 'secret sauce' is often ignored in education and especially in cybersecurity adult retraining. There are some disciplines that tend to attract rules focused types, but that fixation on systemic order blinds them in the edge cases where cybersecurity often operates. Rather than retraining an accountant or rigorously compliant STEM student, I suspect that those exploring subjects like detective work in policing or creatives in the arts would find the skills they've honed more effective, but that doesn't stop everyone from demanding a computer science degree for any job in cyber.

In 2019 after the Terabytches went to CyberTitan nationals we got invited on the local radio station to talk about the experience. The interviewer asked me a good question about our DIY approach to computer tech. I was annoyed at the lack of resources, but he suggested it might be what gave us an edge. He was right, we'd been jugaading and it made us mighty!

There are many jobs in cybersecurity. People who lean toward the jugaad end where they can problem solve without restrictions can find a comfortable fit in operational cybersecurity where they are monitoring real time threats, penetration testing where they are attempting to exploit a client's system to highlight vulnerabilities, or threat intelligence which focuses on gathering reconnaissance data on threat actors. But even in the policy and compliance work, a willingness to consider and understand threats and solutions that are outside the box is a necessity. The need to nurture and respect those out of the box thinkers working in unexpected end of the cyber-workforce is essential for management. Those industries that thrive on status quo compliance are the ones you see being hacked most often because they don't respect the skillset.

This map of cybersecurity domains gives you an idea of the many specializations that the field offers, though I would argue that in all of them (even those up the compliance end) an ability to work from your own initiative and experience rather a rule book is essential.

Sam Sheepdog & Ralph Wolf know the score.

I sometimes describe cybersecurity types as sheepdogs. I think many in law enforcement also fit this description. You can't send a goat to fend of wolves, but having a wolf of your own will do the trick. Early on in my transition from IT into cybersecurity I found myself leaning on IT administrative habits that don't work in cyber, and came to realize that the jobs are very different, though the technology is the same. If you have an IT person running your cybersecurity you're likely to be constantly surprised by the attacks you face because they tend to see systems in an architectural way rather than as an opportunity to be compromised.

It would be easy to say something silly like, 'there are no rules in cybersecurity!' but that's pointlessly reductive. It would also be easy to describe all the people in it as hackers, but this isn't true either, though a mentality that tackles problems from a place of curiosity and jugaad is far better than a rules compliant myopic who can't see beyond the framework they maintain. At the end of all this I firmly believe that you need a bit of the wolf in you if you want to consider a career in cybersecurity. I wish more cybersecurity training and especially adult retraining would emphasize that when looking for candidates rather than demanding STEM grads often missing these skills. If it's a formulaic job that you're looking for, cyber isn't it.

STEM students are often missing skills which "include teamwork, collaboration, leadership, problem-solving, critical thinking, work ethic, persistence, emotional intelligence, organizational skills, creativity, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution." Adding an 'A" to STEM doesn't fix this, incorporating an iterative, resilient, interrogative, team-based problem solving mindset into STEM subjects would, but that doesn't tend to be how we teach it.

Another piece of Canada's cybersecurity puzzle came into focus from the last post on how our cybereducation system is broken. In response to that, Francois Guay from the Canadian Cybersecurity Network followed up with the observation that the cybersecurity talent pipeline in Canada is also in tatters.

I've been thinking about that post and believe all of the responses from both new cybersecurity practitioners and veterans are valid. It would appear that when you try to fix a talent shortage with rushed retraining based on incorrect assumptions about the skillsets needed in cybersecurity, no one trusts the results. Problems such as absurd requirements for entry level positions like asking for 5 years of experience on a tool that only came out last year or demands for that vaunted yet irrelevant computer science degree continue to strangle entry level workers coming into the field, even though they have hacked (cough) their way through our broken cyber education system to do it.

Not to sound hopelessly jugaad, but the simple solution would be to introduce cybersecurity apprenticeships that give a more diverse set of potential candidates the opportunity to see if cybersecurity is a field of study that suits them. Those with the right combination of fearless curiosity, critical thinking and tenacity might find their way into it instead of continually opening the doors to STEM grads who are good at being told what to do and enjoyed the privilege growing up of being able to handle the enormous homework loads STEM subjects demand as part of their compliance regime. Students with a background in science and technology might be familiar with the medium that cybersecurity operates in, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to handle the stochastic demands that resonate across cybersecurity work. It's better to find those with the right jugaad mentality; technical familiarity will build quickly powered by enthusiastic initiative and tenacious problem solving.

I've always told my students that if they can bring a willingness to explore, experiment and a fearlessness in breaking things in the process of figuring them out, they don't need to sweat the technicalities, I can teach them those by harnessing the curiosity they bring with them. I've had strong technical students struggle in cyber because they lean on formulaic approaches to computing (they are often maths strong coders) that let them do the bare minimum. If your natural talents in mathematics and computer science have blessed you with a compliance based work ethic, cyber with its changeable success criteria isn't for you. Another favourite adage of mine in the classroom is, 'if you're looking for a way to do less, you'll usually find it.' Those that want to work in a framework often do it so that they can delineate where they can stop; in other words it's used as a way to limit their involvement. That's no way to approach cybersecurity. If solving a problem is a nine to five gig for you, go find work elsewhere.

Much of this comes back to the reductive way we have approached digital skills development (when we're not ignoring them entirely). Cyber Education is the hidden, much larger part of the digital skills iceberg.