The Strange Story of Security’s Next Superstar

It’s late 2003. Two years ago planes flew into the Twin Towers. Western governments are looking for ways to counter the terrorist threat. Nation states are hugely distrustful of one another. The war in Iraq is just a matter of months old and Saddam Hussein has just been captured by US forces. The War on Terror is in full swing.

Hidden away in a dark room is teenage cryptographer and computing whizzkid James Lyne, a preternaturally talented youngster, with an almost eidetic memory and little will to get outside and see the world. He has little reason to. Fate appears to have dealt him an OK hand. Lyne works for various government agencies on cyber-related defence projects, at a time when nation states are using the internet for all kinds of surreptitious activities, whilst illicit use of the internet is really ramping up, malware production is about to spike significantly and hackers are increasingly recognising how valuable data is. The youngster enjoys his work, he’s getting paid more than people twice his age and he can sit in a cozy, tenebrous room without being bothered by people. Lyne has few friends, so having a social life doesn’t even come into the equation.

Yet one day something doesn’t feel quite right. Some existential urge is nettling him, some ennui has firmly settled in. When he thinks about it, the reclusive life, despite all its perks, isn’t fulfilling. The introverted kid, with his big ginger afro and dearth of social skills, wants to break free. So he does. He waves goodbye to the government work without any job waiting for him, into what he believes will be a life rife with uncertainty, but it’s an abyss he must embrace if he is ever to be content.

Just over eight years on, it is hard to believe this is Lyne’s former self. Meeting Sophos’ director of technology strategy in London’s China Town, he is one of the most urbane, eccentric, energetic, likeable chaps in security. He has just come back from a whirlwind tour, giving hundreds of presentations across the world. It’s a far cry from the gloomy inertia of his teenage years. Where once his passion lay in figuring out cryptographic problems on his own, in the dark whilst “wondering what girls were”, tweed lover Lyne now puts together extravagant presentations in his mission to help the world better understand and appreciate cyber security.

He tells TechWeekEurope about one particularly wacky project, where he will be doing 19-minute TED-style history of cryptography, from the Romans to present day, featuring 700 slides, all of them just pictures. He’s also planning on explaining quantum cryptography using coloured pasta. Meanwhile, he’s built a little quantum crypto device using a fire alarm, some tinfoil, bits of a lava lamp, pieces of a smarpthone and some circuitry. It’s little wonder some have compared Lyne to Dr Who and MacGyver.

He’s something of a mad genius. I venture to call him an idiot savant, at which he laughs. But what is clear is that Lyne, with his charisma, his youth (he’s still just 26) and talent for making security fun, is set to be the next superstar of the industry.

Troubled youth

Rewind to the mid-90s and Lyne’s prospects didn’t look so good. Teachers had completely written off any hope of a prosperous future due to severe dyslexia. “The school had told my parents that in no uncertain terms I was a no-hoper, with hard work maybe mediocre at best. At the age of seven I was struggling to tell the difference between the words ‘cat’ and ‘stick’. It was bad,” Lyne says.

The turning point came when Lyne was given a computer by his parents. It would irrevocably alter his life. The Apple Mac Quadra broke within 10 minutes of Lyne playing with it, but after this unfortunate introduction to machines, it taught him all the skills that would eventually land him a government job. The Mac offered something people could not: patience. It was a very modern case of the machine making the man. “I could go at my speed. I developed all of my interaction with the world today from my computer experience,” he adds.

In school, he went from being seen as useless, to being smarter and faster than his teachers. The dyslexia disappeared. He was thrown out of IT classes because he was so much more advanced than everyone else. “I’d gone through a significant change, most of it due to the computer, due to being able to use the internet, combine together multiple sources at high speed, collate stuff – skills that we in this day and age take for granted, but actually when you go back a few years when the internet was growing up, they were more uncommon.”

There was one day that stood out for Lyne, when everything inexplicably became clearer. “It’s the strangest thing. I wish I had a better explanation of this experience. I remember this one day where I went to school and I went from really struggling to the complete opposite. And I honestly don’t know what happened. Something fired, something made sense. It was just weird. Being extroverted came along a lot later. I look back and I barely recognise myself.”

Lyne’s academic record caught the attention of his French teacher, whose husband was involved in market intelligence and defence forecasting and was looking for someone technical to carry out mundane tasks at the weekend. Lyne was the perfect fit. Except soon enough Lyne’s new employer realised the boy had talent.

“He gave me some really interesting problems, like building out some interesting automated data analysis. He gave me a few GB of unstructured data on different projects and asked me to find different ways to parse this to pull out data and present it in a certain format. So I wrote a few programs, ripped the stuff out and produced some online web portals that started taking their paper-based delivery mechanism of certain intelligence data over to the web. Then before long, we got into delivering open source intelligence data securely.”

It was then that Lyne learnt of cryptography, something he describes as “like un-frying an egg”. He devoured books on the subject, from Bletchley Park history to analysis problem solving texts. “I very quickly learnt this lesson that has been invaluable in my career: people can throw words at you symbolising security, but unless you look at the implementation underneath, it means nothing. For example, you can say something is encrypted with AES 256 and everyone will say it’s really secure. But if the keys and the passwords are stored in a paper bag in the middle of the street, it’s worthless. I’ve applied that principle across every aspect of security that I’ve worked across.”

Not only did Lyne get into crypto, he began writing his own cryptographic problems. The teenager began specialising in the strengths and merits of true random number generators, which use fundamental principles of quantum mechanics to produce a random string of numbers, versus pseudo-random number generators, which employ mathematical algorithms to generate random numbers and that most people use today. For this, he attracted the attention of the government. “I spent a lot of time in a dark room for all kinds of government organisations, defence bodies,” says Lyne, who cannot go into much more detail, for obvious reasons.

Emerging from the dark

It was after a few years of working for defence bodies that Lyne wanted out. “I had this realisation one day, and I don’t know what caused it, that I was sitting in a dark room, going home and obsessively working further trying to solve problems. It was one of those moments where I realised it was just sad.”

The day after Lyne quit, he received a call from a recruiter who asked him if he was interested in a job at Sophos. But how did that recruiter know who Lyne was? “He wouldn’t tell me how he got my details. I didn’t even have a CV. He still won’t tell me. It was really weird.”

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