Designing Secure Software consolidates more than twenty years of experience
into a concise, elegant guide to improving the security of technology products.
Written for a wide range of software professionals, it emphasizes building
security into software design early and involving the entire team
in the process.
The book begins with a discussion of core concepts, covering trust, threats,
mitigation, secure design patterns, and cryptography. The second part,
perhaps this book’s most unique and important contribution to the field,
covers the process of designing and reviewing a software design with security
considerations in mind. The final section details the most common coding flaws
that create vulnerabilities, making copious use of code snippets written in
C and Python to illustrate implementation vulnerabilities.
You’ll learn how to:
- Identify important assets, the attack surface, and the trust boundaries
in a system
- Evaluate the effectiveness of various threat mitigation candidates
- Work with well-known mitigations and secure design patterns
- Understand and prevent vulnerabilities like XSS and CSRF, memory flaws,
and more
- Use security testing to proactively identify vulnerabilities introduced
into code
- Review a software design for security flaws effectively and without judgment
“The writing in this book is very clear and easy reading,
and the examples used are both captivating and easy to understand.
Kohnfelder does a great job of making a point that is easy to understand,
and most of the chapters could stand alone for developers just working
in that one particular area.”
(read the full review)
Sales categories adjustment
Posted on July 15, 2021
| Loren Kohnfelder
When the book appeared in the Amazon marketplace I set up an author’s page and claimed the title. I expected some sort of verification, but they just granted me the book I asked for.
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Updating Hugo
Posted on July 15, 2021
| Loren Kohnfelder
Hugo has worked well for me building this static website overall. However, it remains generally somewhat mysterious and there have been some bumps.
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Publication date set
Posted on July 5, 2021
| Loren Kohnfelder
This Monday morning I started the week by discovering that a publication date is set for the book: October 19, 2021.
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Cover design
Posted on May 20, 2021
| Loren Kohnfelder
Once the title was chosen by the publisher (in consultation, of course) the cover design becomes the next topic of discussion.
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Layout design for Appendix A
Posted on May 10, 2021
| Loren Kohnfelder
Writing about software design is difficult because there is little to no standard methodology or practice – everyone does it differently.
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Copy edit of a chapter
Posted on April 3, 2021
| Loren Kohnfelder
Copy edit is the last chance to make significant changes to the text. Most chapters involve plenty of sentence rewriting and a few moves of a paragraph, but much of the delta is punctuation and word choice.
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Artwork ready for review
Posted on March 16, 2021
| Loren Kohnfelder
The artwork came back as a PDF with one drawing per page, labeled by filename. The first batch was pretty good, considering that Richard (I learned the artist’s name) must have had no idea what the symbols meant.
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