Tim Dickinson

Leonardo Lees

Evan Lowry

Julien Richard

Stephen Smith

Jenn Hutton

BSides Halifax 2025

BSides Halifax

BSides Halifax is back for 2025! Come join us for another great day of talks and treats as we celebrate the local infosec community.

6050 University Ave

BSides Halifax is proud to announce our 5th (and definitely annual!) Halifax BSides conference!The event will once again be held in person on Thursday, November 13th, 2025, and we can’t wait to bring another full day of talks, networking, and community togetherness to Halifax’s security scene. We’re once again partnering with ShiftKey Labs and will be hosting the conference at Dalhousie University’s Computer Science Building. As always, everyone is welcome — whether you’re a seasoned analyst, an application security expert, or brand new to the field. Tickets will again be available for a minimum donation of $13.37, and we’ll keep that price point as long as we possibly can. This year, all proceeds will go to support the IWK Health Centre, helping improve care and outcomes for children and families across the maritimes. We’re expanding a bit this year too — in addition to coffee and snacks throughout the day, lunch will be provided for all attendees. Expect a mix of familiar faces, new voices, and a fresh lineup of talks and activities. We’re excited to see everyone again this November and to continue growing Halifax’s infosec community together.Get your ticket before they’re gone! (Agenda will be released when confirmed. The event will run from 9:00 a.m. to around 5:00 p.m.)

Agenda

Morning Coffee and Snacks

Welcome & Opening Remarks

This talk is about how to balance creativeness and proactiveness in an ever changing threat landscape.  It's no longer "if" we will get attacked, "when".   Mitigation remains a top priority, but are we too busy trying to stop it, and not focusing on how to recover when it happens. 

Shields Up: Cyber Readiness in an Age of Constant Threats

Quick Break

"The problems I experienced trying to build a security dashboard for a global medtech company, and how you can avoid them.

I literally did try and build a security dashboard for a major medtech company, and after a year of effort, the entire thing got scrapped. Why?

I know now what I should have known then, and I will share the fruits of my wasted year with your audience, so that they may avoid my pain.

Highlights will include:
 - What do you want to know about?
 - What do you want to know about it?
 - Where is that data stored?
 - How are you going to get it?
 - Maintenance concerns

It’s a good story, I’ve enjoyed telling it over a beer many times, and now I’d like to share it with the world.

Due to being based on a real story, this talk will be mildly prescriptive about technology choices (Python/Terraform/AWS), but still general enough to be widely applicable."

Security Dashboards: How To Build One That Works

Networking Break

"My talk is about the risks associated with trusting people, companies, or government entities with your data and messages, and how we can avoid these risks using alternative methods of communication. 

How? I will go briefly go into how most ""deleted"" data is in-fact not deleted but just tagged and archived, how computers are becoming more powerful, making our current forms of encryption weaker, and I will showcase my open source project Carrier Pigeon. Carrier Pigeon is a firmware / web app, written for the ESP32 microcontroller that uses the LoRa radio protocol to communicate messages that have been encrypted using AES-GCM and ECDH.

Why? Because I believe that in the coming years, quantum computing will pose a significant threat to currently ""secure"" data, and data exchanges. I want to inspire others with my passion project, to come up with their own new and creative ideas to mitigate these coming challenges!"

Carrier Pigeon: Decentralized Communication with LoRa

Lunch 

Security Jeopardy

Security teams don’t fail because they lack visibility, they fail because they lack control. Every year, organizations spend millions on tools that tell them what’s wrong but not how to fix it. Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) offers a path forward, yet most programs stall after scoping and discovery. 

In this talk, we’ll explore how practitioners can operationalize exposure management in their own environments without buying new tech stacks or adding headcount. We’ll share lessons learned from real-world customers who’ve moved from reactive firefighting to proactive exposure reduction using the tools they already own. Attendees will leave with a blueprint for turning visibility into measurable risk reduction, and for building collaboration between security, IT, and business leaders.

From Chaos to Control: Operationalizing Continuous Threat Exposure Management

"Everyone keeps talking about nation state attacks on Canadian companies, but when you try to find the real details, there isn’t much to work with. You’ll see a few headlines, a government alert, maybe a blog post from a vendor, and that’s about it. Most of the time it ends with “stay vigilant,” which doesn’t help when you’re the one actually running the tools.

This talk is about taking what little information we do get and turning it into something useful. I’ll go over a few real examples like the Salt Typhoon attacks against telecoms and show how you can pull out the interesting parts, map them to real behavior, and use that to hunt or harden your environment.

We’ll also talk about how to find good intel without paying for it, how to know what’s worth your time, and how to build a simple routine so that when a new advisory drops you already know what to do next.

If you’ve ever looked at a bulletin and thought “ok but now what,” this session will give you a clear, practical answer.

So a Nation State Targeted Canada... Now What?

In security, we're often confronted with what feels like a constant stream of unique problems. But what if they're the same fundamental challenges, just metamorphosing into different shapes? This talk uses woodworking as a lens to find these patterns. We'll explore why a well-designed joint is stronger than simply adding more nails, and how 'reading the grain' of a board is just like identifying the hidden stresses in our own applications.

The goal of these metaphors is to strengthen the mental connections that help us see problems more clearly. This is for those who want to move beyond checklists to understand why things are done, applying foundational principles contextually. This is not a 'how-to' guide; it's about building a better intuition for system design.

This Joint Will Fail Under Load: Lessons in Secure Design from the Woodshop

Closing Remarks & Networking

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BSides Halifax 2025

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