Designing Secure Software: A Guide for Developers

Designing Secure Software

consolidates Loren Kohnfelder's 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 like 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 secure coding patterns and libraries

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