This site is part of my personal knowledge vault, it hosts a growing resource designed to help the security community, professionals and scientists, consider security challenges in addressing, designing, developing and continually improving modern societies security and resiliency. Of particular interest are the challenges associated with converged security in the context of critical infrastructures and lifeline services arising from the integration of information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and IoT systems in support of business models and solutions.
If you’ve been working your way through your own security problems, you may be thinking something like… “This website is just parroting the same advice that I’ve found on other places, what a waste of time!”… and you may well have a point. When it comes to your problems, you are the expert in them, not me. With this in mind, I’d like to invite you to consider looking at your problems in a different way.
For example,
Rather than giving advice, I would like to invite you to search for new approaches and solutions with me, working together. The consistent thing about problems is that requirements and our experience of them is always changing. The idea here is not to stop doing your problem, but to do your problem (whatever it is) differently by learning employing cross-disciplinary approaches and reflection.
What do I mean by learning from cross-disciplinary approach?
It is about learning by creating something and thinking across boundaries.
Living in the age of information and cyber-physical systems, with all its wicked challenges, it is more important than ever to create new types of knowledge to understand our complex nature and needs better. Cross-disciplinary approach to research is about crossing disciplinary boundaries in one way or another, breaking traditional disciplin’s own organizational culture, settings and rules. Crossing discipline is about breaking these rules and crafting new ones! However, most of the professionals and researchers still work in silos. Today’s challenges urge professionals and researchers to step out of their comfort zone and work across boundaries to capture how security challenges affect the cyber-physical world from different perspectives.
Cross-disciplinary learning is exactly what it sounds like: people combine learning from multiple disciplines to come up with new ways to think about issues and solve problems. They are ‘must have’ tools to deal and learn from complexity. Regardless the type of selected cross-disciplinary approach (multi-, inter- and trans-), what is most important is that cross-disciplinary paths take professionals and researchers through a journey of reflection about what they have to bring to the table and understand each other’s knowledge-domain languages.
Convergent security is one of the most daunting subjects of the 21st century. It is omnipresent in our daily lives, from apparent trivialities, such as remembering an increasing number of passwords, to more significant issues like dealing with electric grids or banking security, and even Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) events. Convergent security seems to be everywhere, is is a pervasive requirement. Current international reality regarding security presents a challenge to the professional and academic sectors to redefine the dominant existing principles of the security concept. This meant the need for the state to move aside as the long-standing predominant security controller and thus for professionals and academics to observe security as a general prerequisite, a fundamental value asset, for the functioning of any cyber-physical system.
Information security was historically a technical subfield of computer science. However, cyber space conflict, cyber space crimes and pervasive computing technology has recently made information security a significant concern not only for economy, social sciences, and management but also for policy and diplomacy. Currently, collaboration and communication between these fields and with the cyber-physical emerging domain is lacking, as evidenced by differing terminology between these fields and few interdisciplinary journal publications.
I suggest that this corpus of knowledge can be extended to other disciplines to make convergent security practice and studies yet more comprehensive, and also demonstrate elasticity to adapt, as an independent professional and scientific discipline, to the demands of change and new times. This need has been particularly pronounced in the decades that followed the Cold War, in the period of dynamic economic, political and technological globalization, where the security of individuals, social groups, business and institutional systems, has become a dominant aspect in the functioning of modern society. In that sense, the establishment of security science as an independent discipline is necessary not only for the development of a theoretical model, but also because of its wide practical application in modern, globalized world.
What do I mean by learning from reflection?
Reflection is key in supporting and enabling cross-disciplinary in convergent security. A reflective space is a place where associations, images, concepts, and ideas can emerge, along with existing knowledge, but don’t have to be turned into a ‘product’ or an action. The process during reflective spaces is intended to be associative rather than logical. According to the old saying from Confucius, “To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.” Reflection is an act that helps you better determine your own true knowledge about something. … While reflection certainly is a mental act, many people write to help make sense of their thoughts.
How do you reflect on your thinking?
A 60-years journey focused in technology evolution and information security, to help us understand some major events and their profound impact on society. Not to persuade us, but to inspire us to think and act.
From supporting societies’ most basic human needs to enabling its most ambitious endeavors in commerce, science, and technology, lifeline services and critical infrastructures underpin modern civilization’s well-being and development. Without them, it would not be Read more…
The COVID-19 pandemic allows governments to employ “extraordinary measures” in favour of the public good, measure that could have significant effects in information policies (Cornelius, 2010). Government agencies around the world, along with private companies, are Read more…