Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, Second Edition

About the Author

Why should I have been the person to write this book? Well, I seem to have accumulated the right mix of experience and qualifications over the last 25 years. I graduated in mathematics and natural science from Cambridge (England) in the 1970s, and got a qualification in computer engineering; my first proper job was in avionics; and I became interested in cryptology and computer security in the mid-1980s. After working in the banking industry for several years, I started doing consultancy for companies that designed equipment for banks, and then working on other applications of this technology, such as prepayment electricity meters.

I moved to academia in 1992, but continued to consult to industry on security technology. During the 1990s, the number of applications that employed cryptology rose rapidly: burglar alarms, car door locks, road toll tags, and satellite TV encryption systems all made their appearance. As the first legal disputes about these systems came along, I was lucky enough to be an expert witness in some of the important cases. The research team I lead had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time when several crucial technologies, such as tamper resistance and digital watermarking, became hot topics.

By about 1996, it started to become clear to me that the existing textbooks were too specialized. The security textbooks focused on the access control mechanisms in operating systems, while the cryptology books gave very detailed expositions ...