On 16 November, CISSE UK ran a well-attended Cyber Security Education and Employability Forum in collaboration with the The Open University. This forum explored: Routes into Cyber Security Education and becoming a cyber security lecturer. CyberFirst’s approach to improving access to cyber careers and improving diversity. The Open University’s work integrating industry certifications (EC-Council’s CEH) into their new Systems penetration testing module. I enjoyed speaking about Cyber Springboard (slides), why I created it, and how it might help you to build and evidence the skills to get a job in cyber security.

Django’s User.is_authenticated may not behave as you expect. When exploring some model relationships, I was surprised that every user in the system seemed to be authenticated. >>> from .models import User >>> User.objects.first().is_authenticated True Initially, I was confused as to why this was the case, thinking this implied the user had a current session within the system. Looking at the code quickly explained why this was the case: class AbstractBaseUser(models.Model): .

Earlier posts introduced using Keycloak for authentication, and registering new users. This post discusses how to log users out of their Keycloak session, instead of ending only their application session. Keycloak, and the mozilla-django-oidc library allow you to log a user out of their session. For this we use another OpenID Connect (OIDC) endpoint. Earlier versions of Keycloak supported a redirectURI parameter, but since Keycloak 18 this is deprecated. The redirectURI parameter has been removed in Keycloak 19 and the Keycloak logout page will display an Invalid parameter: redirect_uri error.

An earlier post introduced using Keycloak as an Identity and Access Management (IAM) system with Django. Keycloak allows you to add authentication to applications and secure services easily as it handles storing and authenticating users. However, the mozilla-django-oidc library does not include a direct registration URL. We can add a URL for direct registration by making use of another OpenID Connect (OIDC) endpoint. Add the OIDC registration endpoint to settings.py.

Keycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management (IAM) system. Keycloak allows you to add authentication to applications and secure services easily as it handles storing and authenticating users. Keycloak provides user federation, strong authentication, user management, fine-grained authorization, and more. In particular, it supports multi-factor authentication (MFA), and WebAuthn using mobile apps and U2F Tokens such as Yubikeys. It supports the OpenID Connect standard, which builds on the OAuth 2.

Cyber Springboard At CISSE UK’s 2022 Cyber Education Conference on “Networking the Cyber Education Ecosystem” at the University of Roehampton, I was delighted to launch Cyber Springboard. Cyber Springboard is a learning platform to help stimulate curiosity as you build and evidence the knowledge, skills and judgement required to help gain employment in cyber security. Motivation During my time in industry working at Roke as the Head of Profession for Cyber & Networks, I’d noticed a common question arising from school leavers, apprentices, undergraduates, postgraduates and mid-career changers:

Cyber Springboard was developed to help students, graduates and mid-career changers as they move towards a career in Cyber Security. Cyber Springboard is a learning platform that helps stimulate curiousity whilst building and evidencing the knowledge, skills and judgement required to help gain employment in cyber security. The activities are also useful to those already in the industry who are looking to broaden their skills or move into other roles.