Cracking the code

Local sixth- through eighth-grade students are learning all about cybersecurity as part of the GenCyber program hosted by California State University, Bakersfield.

Topics of the program cover everything from password-cracking to pocket-sized computers and social engineering. Though they might be several years away from joining the cybersecurity profession, the participants are already thinking of a few practical uses for what they are learning.

"We got to learn how to break codes and make codes, which I'm going to teach to my entire group chat so if they want to say some gossip or a secret, they can," said Sophia R. Alvarez Lopez after a lesson on cryptography. "I found it extremely fun to mess around with the codes."

GenCyber is an initiative sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). It was brought to CSUB by Dr. Kanwal Kaur, an associate professor in CSUB's Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, thanks to a two-year grant she was awarded by the two agencies last year.

The current six-week GenCyber camp kicked off on Sept. 7, with 35 students enrolled. An earlier camp was held over the summer, with 32 students.

For the NSA and NSF, the goal of the GenCyber program is to increase interest in cybersecurity careers. It invites students from different backgrounds to discover a passion for cybersecurity in the hopes of developing a more diverse workforce in the future.

At CSUB, local students are learning cybersecurity principles through hands-on activities, interactive lessons and problem-solving exercises, said Dr. Kaur, the grant's principal investigator and program director.

"The focus is on fun, engaging activities that demonstrate the importance and relevance of cybersecurity in everyday life," she said. "I wanted to work with kids and get them interested in cybersecurity because early exposure to this field can have a profound impact on their future opportunities and career choices."

In the second week of the program, CSUB mathematics professor Dr. Charles Lam taught students a little about the history of cryptography and some basic code-making and -breaking. For an example of early encryption, students were given a page of text and a hint that each letter represented a different letter. Without a key, it was difficult for the students to get more than a couple letters figured out.

"Today's lesson - encryption, decryption, cryptography - that was really fun and interesting," said eighth grader Srikandan Narayanan. "The last activity we did was pretty hard, so it kind of made our brains work!"

Dr. Lam told the students how this kind of encryption method worked well for hundreds of years, with kings, queens and diplomats sending important messages through couriers with little worry of them being intercepted. Until the art of codebreaking improved, that is. As the students learned, looking at letter frequency is a good way to narrow down what each character represents, slowly but surely deciphering a hidden message.

Mathematics brings us into modern day encryption, Dr. Lam said. He told students about mathematician Alan Turing, who was avital part of cracking encoded German messages during World War II. Using letters to represent other letters has limitations, but using numbers to represent letters gives cryptographers many more options.

"When we turn letters into numbers, there are many things we can do; we can turn it into numbers and do math with it," Dr. Lam said. "It takes math and a lot of patience. To make strong cyphers, you have to know how to break them as well."

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