The Craft of System Security

2. The Old Testament

Although the topic of computer security seems to have emerged in relevance in lockstep with the Internet—or perhaps the Web—certain sectors of the population have been thinking about the topic for a long time. In this chapter, we discuss some of the early, foundational thinking about secure systems.

• Section 2.1 outlines the basic framework of this thinking.
• Section 2.2 introduces the notion of formal security models.
• Section 2.3 explains how this old thinking transformed into an explicit standard: the Orange Book.
• Section 2.4 considers some more recent activity that has evolved as a result of this early work.

2.1. The Basic Framework

As we already noted, much of the early thinking about computer security coincided with ...