Beautiful Security

The original English edition of Beautiful Security: Leading Security Experts Explain How They Think was co-edited by Andy Oram, a senior editor at O'Reilly Media, and security expert John Viega. The Chinese edition was brought out in 2011 by China Machine Press (Huazhang), as part of the O'Reilly "Beautiful" series. This is not a tool manual teaching you to install firewalls or configure encryption algorithms, but a collection of essays on ideas jointly written by a number of frontline security practitioners. The whole book unfolds around one central question: how exactly do excellent security workers think about problems? The editors invited authors from industry, academia, and the legal field to approach security from the angles they know best, examining it as a craft that requires an eye for beauty and creative thinking. The topics discussed span a wide range: how the underground economy behind personal information and attack activity operates, and how criminals divide labor and collaborate; the dual impact of emerging technology trends such as social networks and cloud computing on online security; how to raise security to a new level through metrics, requirements gathering, design specifications, and legal means; the little-known evolution of PGP's web of trust; the offense-defense contest within the online advertising ecosystem; proactive detection of client-side vulnerabilities; log processing and event detection; and the organizational and human factors in security design and software security. Because it is a multi-author collection, the chapters vary in style and depth—some lean toward ideas, some toward cases, some toward institutional thinking—but what they share is an attempt to reveal the "beauty" often overlooked in security work: ingenious mechanism design, the intellectual contest between attackers and defenders, and the delicate balance between systems and people. For readers who want to step outside specific tools and build a holistic view of security, this book is more like a window than an operation manual.