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

Preface

For generations, people have defined and protected their property and their privacy using locks, fences, signatures, seals, account books, and meters. These have been supported by a host of social constructs ranging from international treaties through national laws to manners and customs.

This is changing, and quickly. Most records are now electronic, from bank accounts to registers of real property; and transactions are increasingly electronic, as shopping moves to the Internet. Just as important, but less obvious, are the many everyday systems that have been quietly automated. Burglar alarms no longer wake up the neighborhood, but send silent messages to the police; students no longer fill their dormitory washers and dryers with coins, but credit them using a smartcard they recharge at the college bookstore; locks are no longer simple mechanical affairs, but are operated by electronic remote controls or swipe cards; and instead of renting videocassettes, millions of people get their movies from satellite or cable channels. Even the humble banknote is no longer just ink on paper, but may contain digital watermarks that enable many forgeries to be detected by machine.

How good is all this new security technology? Unfortunately, the honest answer is 'nowhere near as good as it should be'. New systems are often rapidly broken, and the same elementary mistakes are repeated in one application after another. It often takes four or five attempts to get a security design right, and ...