Jacob G. Oakley - Theoretical Cybersecurity: Principles and Advanced Concepts

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

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This book is strongly opinionated based on the experience of cybersecurity professionals with roughly 50 years combined between them and ranging across all categorical job functions and facets of the field. It is intended as an introspection regarding the body of work that is cybersecurity. It is also intended as a thought experiment to push those who read it toward a more theoretical approach to cybersecurity. By this, I mean not the theoretical conception of technologies that are used by cybersecurity professionals, but instead theoretical exploration of the craft itself.

Hard and sweeping issues within the field of cybersecurity will be identified, and hard questions posited in this book. Admittedly, a lot of answers will not be forthcoming. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, answers can become dated, opinionated, and situational, so to avoid obsolescence, they will be brought up as concepts instead of detailed how-tos. As such, this book prefers to give the reader the ability to question and theory-craft in the cybersecurity domain rather than provide answers. Second, I like books that can be read front to back and have concepts that a reader walks away with, not a tool based how-to solution or operational guide that holds the readers hand. Also, those books tend to be very heavy and long.

This is not to say that those types of text are not without their merit. For those breaking into the craft of cybersecurity they are great resources. This is instead aimed at those who have some experience in or are working with cybersecurity and aims to provide the basis for further theoretical exploration and introspection on cybersecurity.

Much in this book may be contentious to some readers. We are all professionals with varying levels and areas of experience across the cybersecurity field as well as others. I encourage disagreement with points that may be made or explorations of cybersecurity contained herein. All I ask is that if you read a chapter or a topic and disagree with the point being made, you explore your argument defensibly and thoroughly. If after doing so, you arrive at a conclusion that what is written in this book is incorrect, I urge you to take the time to communicate that to other professionals as widely as possible so that the rest of the field may be the better for your own thought experiment of thoroughly contending what has been stated in the following chapters.