Security Engineering, 3rd Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

The first edition of Security Engineering was published in 2001 and the second in 2008. Since then there have been huge changes.

The most obvious is that the smartphone has displaced the PC and laptop. Most of the world's population now walk around with a computer that's also a phone, a camera and a satnav; and the apps that run on these magic devices have displaced many of the things we were building ten years ago. Taxi rides are now charged by ride-hailing apps rather than by taxi meters. Banking has largely gone online, with phones starting to displace credit cards. Energy saving is no longer about your meter talking to your heating system but about both talking to your phone. Social networking has taken over many people's lives, driving everything from advertising to politics.

A related but less visible change is the move to large server farms. Sensitive data have moved from servers in schools, doctors' offices and law firms to cloud service providers. Many people no longer do their writing on word processing software on their laptop but on Google Docs or Office365 (I'm writing this book on Overleaf). This has consequences. Security breaches can happen at a scale no-one would have imagined twenty years ago. Compromises of tens of millions of passwords, or credit cards, have become almost routine. And in 2013, we discovered that fifteen years' worth of UK hospital medical records had been sold to 1200 organisations worldwide without the consent ...