Nathan Jenniges
Senior Vice-President & General Manager, BlackBerry Secure Communications
With AI enabling increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and digital sovereignty concerns growing, Canadian organizations need to strengthen their cybersecurity and digital resilience.
AI is changing the cybersecurity threat landscape for organizations in Canada and globally, lowering the cost and skill barriers to mounting attacks while increasing their speed and sophistication. Deepfakes, impersonation, and voice cloning are making it more and more challenging to verify who or what can be trusted in digital communications.
Recent research from BlackBerry found that half of security leaders rank impersonation or deepfakes among their top three threats.
“AI has really changed the economics of making an attack, the cost and the skills that an adversary needs,” says Nathan Jenniges, Senior Vice-President and General Manager at BlackBerry Secure Communications. He explains that attacks once associated with sophisticated actors can now come from any individual around the world, with AI lowering the barriers to convincing phishing, voice cloning, and deepfakes.
Rethinking digital trust and control
Knowing who or what to trust in digital communications is especially challenging because AI agents are increasingly acting on people’s behalf. They may use a human user’s identity and credentials to accomplish their tasks.
“If that AI starts doing things that you don’t want it to do, you need to be able to shut it down without shutting down that person’s digital identity,” says Jenniges. That means giving the AI a distinct identity of its own, which allows organizations to distinguish and control it separately.
Jenniges also points to the broader control and security issue of digital sovereignty. Given the enormous amounts of information that AI can collect and concentrate, he stresses the importance of maintaining Canadian control of sensitive data and communications.
Empowering Canada’s digital sovereignty
Concerns about sensitive government, employee, or citizen information flowing through foreign AI systems or infrastructure have led to increased focus on Canadian digital sovereignty. Jenniges explains that there’s an important difference between simply keeping data in Canada and ensuring it remains under full Canadian control.
If AI starts doing things that you don’t want it to do, you need to be able to shut it down without shutting down that person’s digital identity.
Data residency describes the physical location where data is stored, but doesn’t necessarily mean that the broader system is Canadian-controlled. “There was a whole wave with data residency and that’s now shifting to data sovereignty, which means not only is the data resident, but all of the controls to unlock and use that data are also in the country,” says Jenniges.
BlackBerry has a long history as a leader in secure communications in Canada and around the world. In partnership with Shared Services Canada, BlackBerry currently secures over 57,000 managed devices across federal organizations and is expanding its sovereign secure voice capabilities. Its suite of solutions includes BlackBerry UEM, which provides secure device management, and BlackBerry SecuSUITE, which provides secure voice, messaging, file sharing, and identity assurance.
Identity, trust, and secure communications
Jenniges explains that in typical systems, encryption may only protect a message’s content, while exposing other information related to the communication, such as who communicated and when. AI can now analyze huge volumes of this type of information and find patterns and relationships, potentially exposing vulnerabilities. And even if a message is encrypted, it doesn’t confirm that who you think you’re communicating with is who they say they are. SecuSUITE encrypts all aspects of a communication, including all of the metadata surrounding it, keeping the communication more secure.
SecuSUITE has been independently certified by leading organizations including Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, and NATO. “They’ve independently looked at and tried to find that type of identity leakage and information leakage and have certified that our product does exactly what it says it does, that all communication is fully encrypted. That matters significantly,” says Jenniges.
Building cyber resilience
BlackBerry’s research found that while 93 per cent of leaders believe they’re prepared for a major crisis, 51 per cent lack a unified communications platform for those situations.
“What if the very nature of the communications that you rely on is compromised?” says Jenniges.
BlackBerry AtHoc addresses that challenge, providing a separate, secure communication system for use during critical events, helping mission-critical organizations to continue coordinating and making decisions when normal systems are compromised or unavailable. It also supports having response playbooks in place so team members are prepared to act.
Learn more about how BlackBerry Secure Communications helps government, critical infrastructure, and enterprise organizations protect sensitive communications, strengthen digital sovereignty, and build resilience against evolving cyber threats at blackberry.com/secure-communications.
