Cyber Security: Essential Principles to Secure Your Organisation

CHAPTER 3: SECURITY BY DESIGN

For a product (whether software or hardware) to be secure, it must be developed with security in mind from the outset. This was a challenge in the days when most development still used the ‘waterfall’ model; in the era of Agile and similar, more iterative methodologies, the challenge has never been greater.

Secure development is not a new concept. The rapid spread of computers and the Internet in the late 1990s highlighted the myriad security flaws and issues in the era’s operating systems, software and hardware. Viruses and worms proliferated, and customers demanded action. At Microsoft, Bill Gates’s famous 2002 ‘Trustworthy computing’ memo outlined the need for security to become an intrinsic aspect of computing, ...