Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, Second Edition

Chapter 1. What Is Security Engineering?

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

—— Immanuel Kant

The world is never going to be perfect, either on- or offline; so let's not set impossibly high standards for online.

—— Esther Dyson

Introduction

Security engineering is about building systems to remain dependable in the face of malice, error, or mischance. As a discipline, it focuses on the tools, processes, and methods needed to design, implement, and test complete systems, and to adapt existing systems as their environment evolves.

Security engineering requires cross-disciplinary expertise, ranging from cryptography and computer security through hardware tamper-resistance and formal methods to a knowledge of economics, applied psychology, organizations and the law. System engineering skills, from business process analysis through software engineering to evaluation and testing, are also important; but they are not sufficient, as they deal only with error and mischance rather than malice.

Many security systems have critical assurance requirements. Their failure may endanger human life and the environment (as with nuclear safety and control systems), do serious damage to major economic infrastructure (cash machines and other bank systems), endanger personal privacy (medical record systems), undermine the viability of whole business sectors (pay-TV), and facilitate crime (burglar and car alarms). Even the perception that a system is more vulnerable than it really ...