Securing the Digital Frontier: Cyber Security for Responsible Citizens and Strategic Thinkers

Abstract

This book describes the combination of complex systems which make up cyberspace, and explains how that complexity gives rise to security challenges. Daily headlines show us more and more things going wrong with cyber security. Just as cyberspace embraces hardware, software, people, and things, so also its security goes far beyond the narrow confines of computer security and cryptography. The challenge of privacy illustrates this well. Improving security often helps to protect privacy. but deploying simple and effective security controls sometimes introduces transparency which breaks that privacy. In order to explain how cyber security works, the book details some of the key features of software security failures, improvements to hardware security, and network capabilities which help to build a robust cyberspace. These are allied with an account of human failures, adversary behaviours, and some of the legal and ethical frameworks in which these things operate. The topics of identity, pervasive vulnerability, and irreducible complexity place these concerns in and endless tension. The book ends with a consideration of the internet of things, which is quietly transforming our world. Security failures in that domain have the scope to be catastrophic, and it is too soon to say whether society is capable of avoiding the worst outcomes.