Cyber Centre Publishes Cyber Security Considerations for Submarine Cables (ITSP.20.001)

In October 2026 the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security published Cyber security considerations for submarine cables (ITSP.20.001) in its practitioner series. Submarine cables connect Canada's coasts and islands, reach remote communities and carry international traffic, and the guidance expects demand to grow as connectivity reaches new areas, including the Arctic. Landing points and choke points where cables converge are named as high impact points of failure.

The guidance groups threats into three categories. Policy and standards threats include adversaries exploiting gaps to place equipment from low confidence suppliers in Canadian networks, using foreign jurisdictions and landing stations, and reconnoitring cables through public tracking sites and permit registries. Architecture threats cover the network and remote management systems that control a cable, which can be exploited to disrupt service, manipulate traffic or eavesdrop, and physical access that can be used to tap or modify traffic, particularly in remote regions without redundancy. Supply chain threats round out the set. Mitigations include zero trust architecture, least privilege, multifactor authentication, changing vendor default credentials, monitoring and auditing changes at cable sites, route and landing station diversity, and threat information sharing through forums such as the Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

Our take

The Cyber Centre is treating the cable, the landing station and the management plane as one system, and so should anyone who builds or runs long haul fibre. Tapping and eavesdropping are named threats, which makes the encryption on those links a design question, not an afterthought. Long lived equipment, long lived secrets: a cable laid this decade will still be carrying traffic when today's key exchange is no longer safe. Quantum-safe from the first splice, and an inventory of what protects every management connection today. Start your Discovery Program.