The Craft of System Security

Preface

Computer security, once the arcane concern of specialists, is becoming everyone's problem in society. Because so many aspects of society now depend on computing, coaxing or tricking a computer into misbehaving can have serious consequences. Attempts to grasp the nuances of this problem are bedeviled by its sheer complexity—in the individual components and computer hardware, in the operating systems that make this hardware useful, in the application programs, in the network protocols—and in the human processes that use and maintain these systems.

Since security is everyone's problem, a natural question is how to give each cybercitizen the knowledge and perspective needed to reason about these issues. In navigating their careers as software ...