Andy Oram - Beautiful Security: Leading Security Experts Explain How They Think

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I asked security expert John Viega to help find the authors for this book out of frustration concerning the way ordinary computer users view security. Apart from the lurid descriptions of break-ins and thefts they read about in the press, average folks think of security as boring.

Security, to many, is represented by nagging reminders from system administrators to create backup folders, and by seemingly endless dialog boxes demanding passwords before a web page is displayed. Office workers roll their eyes and curse as they read the password off the notepad next to their desk (lying on top of the budget printout that an office administrator told them should be in a locked drawer). If this is security, who would want to make a career of it? Or buy a book from OReilly about it? Or think about it for more than 30 seconds at a time?

To people tasked with creating secure systems, the effort seems hopeless. Nobody at their site cooperates with their procedures, and the business managers refuse to allocate more than a pittance to security. Jaded from the endless instances of zero-day exploits and unpatched vulnerabilities in the tools and languages they have to work with, programmers and system administrators become lax.

This is why books on security sell poorly (although in the last year or two, sales have picked up a bit). Books on hacking into systems sell much better than books about how to protect systems, a trend that really scares me.

Well, this book should change that. It will show that security is about the most exciting career you can have. It is not tedious, not bureaucratic, and not constraining. In fact, it exercises the imagination like nothing else in technology.

Most of the programming books Ive edited over the years offer a chapter on security. These chapters are certainly useful, because they allow the author to teach some general principles along with good habits, but Ive been bothered by the convention because it draws a line around the topic of security. It feeds the all-too-common view of security as an add-on and an afterthought. Beautiful Security demolishes that conceit.

John chose for this book a range of authors who have demonstrated insight over and over in the field and who had something new to say. Some have designed systems that thousands rely on; some have taken high-level jobs in major corporations; some have testified on and worked for government bodies. All of them are looking for the problems and solutions that the rest of us know nothing aboutbut will be talking about a lot a few years from now.

The authors show that effective security keeps you on your toes all the time. It breaks across boundaries in technology, in cognition, and in organizational structures. The black hats in security succeed by exquisitely exercising creativity; therefore, those defending against them must do the same.

With the worlds infosecurity resting on their shoulders, the authors could be chastised for taking time off to write these chapters. And indeed, many of them experienced stress trying to balance their demanding careers with the work on this book. But the time spent was worth it, because this book can advance their larger goals. If more people become intrigued with the field of security, resolve to investigate it further, and give their attention and their support to people trying to carry out organizational change in the interest of better protection, the book will have been well worth the effort.

On March 19, 2009, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on the dearth of experts in information technology and how that hurts the countrys cybersecurity. Theres an urgent need to interest students and professionals in security issues; this book represents a step toward that goal.