Web Commerce Security Design and Development

CHAPTER 7

Trust but Verify: Checking Security

The late American President Ronald Reagan applied the concept of “trust but verify” exquisitely throughout various interactions with his counterpart, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, especially during the signing of the INF Treaty (www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1987/120887c.htm). The concept is simple yet of the utmost importance for any security professional: how to define trust and decide on the level of security to apply to any given situation. This is not an easy task. You must understand the target system that you want to secure both from a holistic perspective as well as in details, to realize where its pitfalls are and whether sufficient security measures have been put in place. For security professionals, the target system is a computing infrastructure with a multitude of components that have to work in tandem. The complexity of our task is increased when we take into account the interaction of the system with its users. The job of security professionals is to ascertain whether the target system is concocted with appropriate levels of protection from design to implementation. Security professionals should also discover flaws, understand their associated risks, and put in place suitable mechanisms to fix them. In practice and to verify how trustworthy the target system is, we need to evaluate protocols, application components, the interactions among different system elements, the communication topology, and the ...