Building Secure and Reliable Systems

Preface

Can a system ever truly be considered reliable if it isn’t fundamentally secure? Or can it be considered secure if it’s unreliable?

Successfully designing, implementing, and maintaining systems requires a commitment to the full system lifecycle. This commitment is possible only when security and reliability are central elements in the architecture of systems. Yet both are often afterthoughts, considered only after an incident occurs, resulting in expensive and sometimes difficult improvements.

Security by design is increasingly important in a world where many products are connected to the internet, and where cloud technologies are becoming more prevalent. The more we come to rely on those systems, the more reliable they need to be; the more trust we place in their security, the more secure they need to be.

Systems

In this book we talk generally about systems, which is a conceptual way of thinking about the groups of components that cooperate to perform some function. In our context of systems engineering, these components typically include pieces of software running on the processors of various computers. They may also include the hardware itself, as well as the processes by which people design, implement, and maintain the systems. Reasoning about the behavior of systems can be difficult, since they’re prone to complex emergent behaviors.

Why We Wrote This Book

We wanted to write a book that focuses on integrating security and reliability directly into the software ...