Building secure software

how to avoid security problems the right way

493 pages

English language

Published 2002 by Addison-Wesley.

ISBN:
978-0-201-72152-2
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OCLC Number:
47238955

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2 stars (1 review)

4 editions

reviewed Building secure software by John Viega (Addison-Wesley professional computing series)

Review of 'Building secure software' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

This book is from 2002. As such, it's a good book for its time, but it's hopelessly outdated for 2014. No TLS 1.2, no discussion of containerization, no actor model for concurrency to avoid race conditions, no bcrypt, no discussion of just using /dev/urandom for randomness...

More to the point, there are some disturbing gaps even in the book itself -- for example, it recommends cryptlib for TLS, but cryptlib only supports TLS-PSK, and doesn't do X.509 certificate authentication, so it couldn't do any secure PKI even if you asked it nicely.

The security principles are great, and I think you could write a book on the details of input validation, and on authentication in general, but this isn't that book. Buy something more up to date instead of this.

Subjects

  • Computer software -- Development
  • Computer security
  • System design