Authors: H. X. Mel. Doris M. Baker.
Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Publication Date: 2000-12-31
Edition: 1976. Corr. 5th

Reviews :

    Cryptography is at the heart of computer security: without it, secure e-commerce and Internet communications would be impossible. Decision-makers and sophisticated computer users need to understand cryptography -- but most explanations are highly mathematical and technical. Cryptography Decrypted explains cryptography in "plain English" -- and is authoritative and thorough enough to address the needs of professionals. It explains the processes step-by-step, with extensive visuals. The authors present the elements of cryptography systems; public key infrastructure (PKI); and the IPSec standard for virtual private network security; then review real-world systems and their applications. They show how real-world systems are attacked, and how to protect them; introduce essential cryptographic terms; and present the fascinating history of cryptography through sidebars highlighting its important events, people, and breakthroughs. For every decision-maker and computer user who needs to understand cryptography, this book is also ideal for security pros who need to educate management about cryptography....

Authors: Ramarao Kanneganti. Prasad Chodavarapu.
Paperback, 500 pages
Publisher: Manning Publications
Publication Date: 2008-01-11


Reviews :

    SOA is one of the latest technologies enterprises are using to tame their software costs - in development, deployment, and management. SOA makes integration easy, helping enterprises not only better utilize their existing investments in applications and infrastructure, but also open up new business opportunities. However, one of the big stumbling blocks in executing SOA is security. This book addresses Security in SOA with detailed examples illustrating the theory, industry standards and best practices.

It is true that security is important in any system. SOA brings in additional security concerns as well rising out of the very openness that makes it attractive. If we apply security principles blindly, we shut ourselves of the benefits of SOA. Therefore, we need to understand which security models and techniques are right for SOA. This book provides such an understanding.

Usually, security is seen as an esoteric topic that is better left to experts. While it is true that security requires expert attention, everybody, including software developers, designers, architects, IT administrators and managers need to do tasks that require very good understanding of security topics. Fortunately, traditional security techniques have been around long enough for people to understand and apply them in practice. This, however, is not the case with SOA Security.

Anyone seeking to implement SOA Security is today forced to dig through a maze of inter-dependent specifications and API docs that assume a lot of prior experience on the part of readers. Getting started on a project is hence proving to be a huge challenge to practitioners. This book seeks to change that. It provides bottom-up understanding of security techniques appropriate for use in SOA without assuming any prior familiarity with security topics on the part of the reader.

Unlike most other books about SOA that merely describe the standards, this book helps you get started immediately by walking you through sample code that illustrates how real life problems can be solved using the techniques and best practices described in standards. Whereas standards discuss all possible variations of each security technique, this book focusses on the 20% of variations that are used 80% of the time. This keeps the material covered in the book simple as well as self-sufficient for all readers except the most advanced....

Authors: Greg Hoglund. Gary McGraw.
Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Publication Date: 2004-02-27


Reviews :

    Praise for Exploiting Software "Exploiting Software highlights the most critical part of the software quality problem. As it turns out, software quality problems are a major contributing factor to computer security problems. Increasingly, companies large and small depend on software to run their businesses every day. The current approach to software quality and security taken by software companies, system integrators, and internal development organizations is like driving a car on a rainy day with worn-out tires and no air bags. In both cases, the odds are that something bad is going to happen, and there is no protection for the occupant/owner. This book will help the reader understand how to make software quality part of the design--a key change from where we are today!" --Tony Scott Chief Technology Officer, IS&S General Motors Corporation "It's about time someone wrote a book to teach the good guys what the bad guys already know. As the computer security industry matures, books like Exploiting Software have a critical role to play."--Bruce Schneier Chief Technology Officer Counterpane Author of Beyond Fear and Secrets and Lies "Exploiting Software cuts to the heart of the computer security problem, showing why broken software presents a clear and present danger. Getting past the 'worm of the day' phenomenon requires that someone other than the bad guys understands how software is attacked. This book is a wake-up call for computer security." --Elinor Mills Abreu Reuters' correspondent "Police investigators study how criminals think and act. Military strategists learn about the enemy's tactics, as well as their weapons and personnel capabilities. Similarly, information security professionals need to study their criminals and enemies, so we can tell the difference between popguns and weapons of mass destruction. This book is a significant advance in helping the 'white hats' understand how the 'black hats' operate. Through extensive examples and 'attack patterns,' this book helps the reader understand how attackers analyze software and use the results of the analysis to attack systems.Hoglund and McGraw explain not only how hackers attack servers, but also how malicious server operators can attack clients (and how each can protect themselves from the other). An excellent book for practicing security engineers, and an ideal book for an undergraduate class in software security." --Jeremy Epstein Director, Product Security & Performance webMethods, Inc. "A provocative and revealing book from two leading security experts and world class software exploiters, Exploiting Software enters the mind of the cleverest and wickedest crackers and shows you how they think. It illustrates general principles for breaking software, and provides you a whirlwind tour of techniques for finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, along with detailed examples from real software exploits. Exploiting Software is essential reading for anyone responsible for placing software in a hostile environment--that is, everyone who writes or installs programs that run on the Internet." --Dave Evans, Ph.D.Associate Professor of Computer Science University of Virginia "The root cause for most of today's Internet hacker exploits and malicious software outbreaks are buggy software and faulty security software deployment. In Exploiting Software, Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw help us in an interesting and provocative way to better defend ourselves against malicious hacker attacks on those software loopholes. The information in this book is an essential reference that needs to be understood, digested, and aggressively addressed by IT and information security professionals everywhere." --Ken Cutler, CISSP, CISA Vice President, Curriculum Development & Professional Services, MIS Training Institute "This book describes the threats to software in concrete, understandable, and frightening detail. It also discusses how to find these problems before the bad folks do. A valuable addition to every programmer's and security person's library!" --Matt Bishop, Ph.D.Professor of Computer Science University of California at Davis Author of Computer Security: Art and Science "Whether we slept through software engineering classes or paid attention, those of us who build things remain responsible for achieving meaningful and measurable vulnerability reductions. If you can't afford to stop all software manufacturing to teach your engineers how to build secure software from the ground up, you should at least increase awareness in your organization by demanding that they read Exploiting Software. This book clearly demonstrates what happens to broken software in the wild." --Ron Moritz, CISSP Senior Vice President, Chief Security Strategist Computer Associates "Exploiting Software is the most up-to-date technical treatment of software security I have seen. If you worry about software and application vulnerability, Exploiting Software is a must-read. This book gets at all the timely and important issues surrounding software security in a technical, but still highly readable and engaging, way.Hoglund and McGraw have done an excellent job of picking out the major ideas in software exploit and nicely organizing them to make sense of the software security jungle." --George Cybenko, Ph.D. Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Security and Privacy "This is a seductive book. It starts with a simple story, telling about hacks and cracks. It draws you in with anecdotes, but builds from there. In a few chapters you find yourself deep in the intimate details of software security. It is the rare technical book that is a readable and enjoyable primer but has the substance to remain on your shelf as a reference. Wonderful stuff." --Craig Miller, Ph.D. Chief Technology Officer for North America Dimension Data "It's hard to protect yourself if you don't know what you're up against. This book has the details you need to know about how attackers find software holes and exploit them--details that will help you secure your own systems." --Ed Felten, Ph.D. Professor of Computer Science Princeton University "If you worry about software and application vulnerability, Exploiting Software is a must-read.This book gets at all the timely and important issues surrounding software security in a technical, but still highly readable and engaging way." --George Cybenko, Ph.D. Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine "Exploiting Software is the best treatment of any kind that I have seen on the topic of software vulnerabilities." --From the Foreword by Aviel D. Rubin Associate Professor, Computer Science Technical Director, Information Security Institute, Johns Hopkins University How does software break? How do attackers make software break on purpose? Why are firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus software not keeping out the bad guys? What tools can be used to break software? This book provides the answers. Exploiting Software is loaded with examples of real attacks, attack patterns, tools, and techniques used by bad guys to break software. If you want to protect your software from attack, you must first learn how real attacks are really carried out. This must-have book may shock you--and it will certainly educate you.Getting beyond the script kiddie treatment found in many hacking books, you will learn about *Why software exploit will continue to be a serious problem *When network security mechanisms do not work *Attack patterns *Reverse engineering *Classic attacks against server software *Surprising attacks against client software *Techniques for crafting malicious input *The technical details of buffer overflows *Rootkits Exploiting Software is filled with the tools, concepts, and knowledge necessary to break software....

    Computing hardware would have no value without software; software tells hardware what to do. Software therefore must have special authority within computing systems. All computer security problems stem from that fact, and Exploiting Software: How to Break Code shows you how to design your software so it's as resistant as possible to attack. Sure, everything's phrased in offensive terms (as instructions for the attacker, that is), but this book has at least as much value in showing designers what sorts of attacks their software will face (the book could serve as a checklist for part of a pre-release testing regimen). Plus, the clever reverse-engineering strategies that Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw teach will be useful in many legitimate software projects. Consider this a recipe book for mayhem, or a compendium of lessons learned by others. It depends on your situation.

PHP programmers will take issue with the authors' blanket assessment of their language ("PHP is a study in bad security"), much of which seems based on older versions of the language that had some risky default behaviors--but those programmers will also double-check their servers' register_globals settings. Users of insufficiently patched Microsoft and Oracle products will worry about the detailed attack instructions this book contains. Responsible programmers and administrators will appreciate what amounts to documentation of attackers' rootkits for various operating systems, and will raise their eyebrows at the techniques for writing malicious code to unused EEPROM chips in target systems. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to make software fail, either by doing something it wasn't designed to do, or by denying its use to its rightful users. Techniques--including reverse engineering, buffer overflow, and particularly provision of unexpected input--are covered along with the tools needed to carry them out. A section on hardware viruses is detailed and frightening....

Authors: Gary Halleen. Greg Kellogg.
Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Cisco Press
Publication Date: 2007-07-16
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

Security Monitoring with Cisco Security MARS

 

Threat mitigation system deployment

 

Gary Halleen

Greg Kellogg

 

Networks and hosts are probed hundreds or thousands of times a day in an attempt to discover vulnerabilities. An even greater number of automated attacks from worms and viruses stress the same devices. The sheer volume of log messages or events generated by these attacks and probes, combined with the complexity of an analyst needing to use multiple monitoring tools, often makes it impossible to adequately investigate what is happening.

 

Cisco® Security Monitoring, Analysis, and Response System (MARS) is a next-generation Security Threat Mitigation system (STM). Cisco Security MARS receives raw network and security data and performs correlation and investigation of host and network information to provide you with actionable intelligence. This easy-to-use family of threat mitigation appliances enables you to centralize, detect, mitigate, and report on priority threats by leveraging the network and security devices already deployed in a network, even if the devices are from multiple vendors.

 

Security Monitoring with Cisco Security MARS helps you plan a MARS deployment and learn the installation and administration tasks you can expect to face. Additionally, this book teaches you how to use the advanced features of the product, such as the custom parser, Network Admission Control (NAC), and global controller operations. Through the use of real-world deployment examples, this book leads you through all the steps necessary for proper design and sizing, installation and troubleshooting, forensic analysis of security events, report creation and archiving, and integration of the appliance with Cisco and third-party vulnerability assessment tools.

 

“In many modern enterprise networks, Security Information Management tools are crucial in helping to manage, analyze, and correlate a mountain of event data. Greg Kellogg and Gary Halleen have distilled an immense amount of extremely valuable knowledge in these pages. By relying on the wisdom of Kellogg and Halleen embedded in this book, you will vastly improve your MARS deployment.”

—Ed Skoudis, Vice President of Security Strategy, Predictive Systems

 

Gary Halleen is a security consulting systems engineer with Cisco. He has in-depth knowledge of security systems as well as remote-access and routing/switching technology. Gary is a CISSP and ISSAP. His diligence was responsible for the first successful computer crimes conviction in the state of Oregon. Gary is a regular speaker at security events and presents at Cisco Networkers conferences.

 

Greg Kellogg is the vice president of security solutions for Calence, LLC. He is responsible for managing the company’s overall security strategy. Greg has more than 15 years of networking industry experience, including serving as a senior security business consultant for the Cisco Enterprise Channel organization. Additionally, Greg worked for Protego Networks, Inc. (where MARS was originally developed). There he was responsible for developing channel partner programs and helped solution providers increase their security revenue.

 

Learn the differences between various log aggregation and correlation systems

• Examine regulatory and industry requirements
• Evaluate various deployment scenarios
• Properly size your deployment
• Protect the Cisco Security MARS appliance from attack
• Generate reports, archive data, and implement disaster recovery plans
• Investigate incidents when Cisco Security MARS detects an attack
• Troubleshoot Cisco Security MARS operation
• Integrate Cisco Security MARS with Cisco Security Manager, NAC, and third-party devices
• Manage groups of MARS controllers with global controller operations

 

This security book is part of the Cisco Press® Networking Technology Series. Security titles from Cisco Press help networking professionals secure critical data and resources, prevent and mitigate network attacks, and build end-to-end self-defending networks.

 

Category: Cisco Press—Security

Covers: Security Threat Mitigation

 

 

...

Authors: Chris Snyder. Michael Southwell.
Paperback, 528 pages
Publisher: Apress
Publication Date: 2005-08-29
Edition: 1

Reviews :

   

Pro PHP Security is one of the first books devoted solely to PHP security. It will serve as your complete guide for taking defensive and proactive security measures within your PHP applications. (And the methods discussed are compatible with PHP versions 3, 4, and 5.)

The knowledge you'll gain from this comprehensive guide will help you prevent attackers from potentially disrupting site operation or destroying data. And you'll learn about various security measures, for example, creating and deploying "captchas," validating e-mail, fending off SQL injection attacks, and preventing cross-site scripting attempts.

...

Authors: Charles Edge. William Barker. Zack Smith.
Paperback, 488 pages
Publisher: Apress
Publication Date: 2008-04-24


Reviews :

   

Foundations of Mac OS X Leopard Security is written in part as a companion to the SANS Institute course for Mac OS X. It contains detailed Mac OS X security information, but also walkthroughs on securing systems. By using the SANS Institute course as a sister to the book, the focus includes both the beginning home user and the seasoned security professional not accustomed to the Mac, and allows this title to establish the “best practices” for Mac OS X for a wide audience. Additionally, the authors of the book are seasoned Mac and security professionals, having built many of the largest network infrastructures for Apple and spoken at both DefCon and Black Hat on OS X security.

What you’ll learn

• Security overview
• Walkthroughs to secure systems
• Walkthroughs and suggestions for third–party applications on systems
• Mac forensics
• Mac hacking
• Apple wireless security
• Mac OS X security

Who is this book for?

A wide audience of users, power users, and administrators who wish to make sure their Mac platform is secure.

...

Authors: Ryan Russell. Ido Dubrawsky. FX. Joe Grand. Tim Mullen.
Paperback, 330 pages
Publisher: Syngress
Publication Date: 2003-04-01
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    "Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box is a unique book in the fiction department. It combines stories that are false, with technology that is real. While none of the stories have happened, there is no reason why they could not. You could argue it provides a road map for criminal hackers, but I say it does something else; it provides a glimpse into the creative minds of some of today’s best hackers, and even the best hackers will tell you that the game is a mental one." - from the foreword by Jeff Moss, President & CEO, BlackHat, Inc....

    Stealing the Network is a book of science fiction. It's a series of short stories about characters who gain unauthorized access to equipment and information, or deny use of those resources to the people who are meant to have access to them. The characters, though sometimes well described, are not the stars of these stories. That honor belongs to the tools that the black-hat hackers use in their attacks, and also to the defensive measures arrayed against them by the hapless sysadmins who, in this volume, always lose. Consider this book, with its plentiful detail, the answer to every pretty but functionally half-baked user interface ever shown in a feature film.

One can read this book for entertainment, though its writing falls well short of cyberpunk classics like Burning Chrome and Snow Crash. Its value is in its explicit references to current technologies--Cisco routers, OpenSSH, Windows 2000--and specific techniques for hacking them (the heroes and heroines of this book are always generous with command-history dumps). The specific detail may open your eyes to weaknesses in your own systems (or give you some ideas for, ahem, looking around on the network). Alternately, you can just enjoy the extra realism that the detail adds to these stories of packetized adventure. --David Wall...

Authors: Chandra Kopparapu.
Hardcover, 208 pages
Publisher: Wiley
Publication Date: 2002-01-25
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    From an industry insider--a close look at high-performance, end-to-end switching solutions
Load balancers are fast becoming an indispensable solution for handling the huge traffic demands of the Web. Their ability to solve a multitude of network and server bottlenecks in the Internet age ranges from dramatic improvements in server farm scalability to removing the firewall as a network bottleneck. This book provides a detailed, up-to-date, technical discussion of this fast-growing, multibillion dollar market, covering the full spectrum of topics--from server and firewall load balancing to transparent cache switching to global server load balancing. In the process, the author delivers insight into the way new technologies are deployed in network infrastructure and how they work. Written by an industry expert who hails from a leading Web switch vendor, this book will help network and server administrators improve the scalability, availability, manageability, and security of their servers, firewalls, caches, and Web sites....

Authors: Fergus Strachan.
Paperback, 376 pages
Publisher: Syngress
Publication Date: 2008-06-03


Reviews :

    This book is a convenient, targeted, single-source guide to integrating Microsoft's ISA Server with Exchange 2007 SP1. Unlike longwinded "comprehensive resources" it doesn't waste time re-hashing general information on the architectures and purposes of ISA and Exchange for raw beginners. Instead, its pragmatic purpose is to smooth the path of the busy administrator who is under pressure to get the integration done quickly, and done right, the first time. It features "break-out sessions" for issues that require in-depth discussion, "tips and tricks" sections that hone in on and demystify trouble spots, and "FAQs" alphabetized by topic that act as a quick-reference for readers who just want a quick answer to a specific question.

Readers will learn how to:
*Create the protocol definitions and firewall policy to allow only authorized users to connect to your Exchange Server
*Configure SMTP Filtering and SMTP Message Screener
*Troubleshoot the SSL connection to your Exchange Server
*Take advantage of ISA 2006's integrated Exchange 2007 support
*Enable forms-based authentication for Outlook Web Access
*Leverage unified SSL, VPN, application-layer filtering and endpoint security
to optimize access for mobile devices
*Configure user-based settings to provide pre-authenticated access to specific Web applications
...and much more!

*Practical and focused, this guide explains explains everything you need to know in order to successfully integrate ISA 2006 and Exchange 2007, without wasting time on minutiae
*Tips and tricks from the expert author help you avoid pitfalls before you stumble into them, troubleshoot problems with ease, and optimize performance
*In-depth coverage of Exchange SP1 highlights the many security enhancements that optimize integration with ISA...

Authors: Joseph Kong.
Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: No Starch Press
Publication Date: 2007-04-10


Reviews :

    Though rootkits have a fairly negative image, they can be used for both good and evil. Designing BSD Rootkits arms you with the knowledge you need to write offensive rootkits, to defend against malicious ones, and to explore the FreeBSD kernel and operating system in the process.

Organized as a tutorial, Designing BSD Rootkits will teach you the fundamentals of programming and developing rootkits under the FreeBSD operating system. Author Joseph Kong's goal is to make you smarter, not to teach you how to write exploits or launch attacks. You'll learn how to maintain root access long after gaining access to a computer and how to hack FreeBSD.

Kongs liberal use of examples assumes no prior kernel-hacking experience but doesn't water down the information. All code is thoroughly described and analyzed, and each chapter contains at least one real-world application.

Included:

The fundamentals of FreeBSD kernel module programming

Using call hooking to subvert the FreeBSD kernel

Directly manipulating the objects the kernel depends upon for its internal record-keeping

Patching kernel code resident in main memory; in other words, altering the kernel's logic while it's still running

How to defend against the attacks described

Hack the FreeBSD kernel for yourself!...