Secure by Design

9 Handling failures securely

This chapter covers

• Separating business and technical exceptions
• Removing security issues by designing for failure
• Why availability is an important security goal
• Designing for resilience for a more secure system
• Unvalidated data and security vulnerabilities

What is it that makes failures so interesting from a security perspective? Could it be that many systems reveal their internal secrets when they fail? Or is it how handling failure defines a system’s level of security? Regardless, recognizing that failures and security go hand-in-hand is incredibly important when designing secure software. This, in turn, requires understanding what the security implications are when making certain design choices. For example, ...