Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering Now Available For Free Download
// August 31st, 2006 // No Comments » // Security & Privacy
Ross Anderson’s 2001 magnum opus Security Engineering is now freely available to the public for download.
From the Amazon.com editorial review:
“Gigantically comprehensive and carefully researched, Security Engineering makes it clear just how difficult it is to protect information systems from corruption, eavesdropping, unauthorized use, and general malice. Better, Ross Anderson offers a lot of thoughts on how information can be made more secure (though probably not absolutely secure, at least not forever) with the help of both technologies and management strategies. His work makes fascinating reading and will no doubt inspire considerable doubt–fear is probably a better choice of words–in anyone with information to gather, protect, or make decisions about.”
The book offers some intriguing fodder for security buffs including a chapter on the history of the technologies behind Nuclear Command and Control systems.
It is very comprehensive and touches on a wide array of systems and the security issues relating to each. The nature and quality of the content is such that it will remain timely information for years to come.
Of course if you find it worthwhile, help Ross pay his bills and actually pay for a copy. But it’s great that this valuable resource is now available to a wider audience. Hooray to Ross and Wiley Publishing for making it available for free!
Short version… AOL released the search logs of over 650,000 users for “research” purposes. Following the almost immediate backlash, they took the site down but not before it was mirrored across the Internet and is still widely available.
