Skip to main content

Designing for Security

Ideally, thinking of security at the start of a project will mean more hard decisions and discussions and work up front, but a better implementation and product in the end. Like so much of software engineering, it's a team sport and an infrequently included group in security discussions are the designers, like the folks doing Human Centered Design (HCD or UCD), User Experience (UX) or whomever in your world takes care of designing the parts of the system the users touch.

They can help a lot with designing security into a product and setting a cyber security mindset. The article on linked in (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-security-lindsay-morsillo/) looks at this in more detail (7-10 minutes to read).


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Not Mess Around with Security on our Personal Systems Either!

Essential Security Practices for Your Personal Systems Ensuring a minimal level of cybersecurity, privacy, and availability on your personal systems means you need to manage the following essential practices. This is a brief overview of recommendations from sources like CISA, NSA, etc., focused on personal laptop, phone, and other systems' security. Anti-virus  I've found you'll get the best anti-virus protection and usability from a paid product - I've always had good luck with Norton labeled products. If you are looking for current vendor offerings see:  https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-antivirus-protection Regardless of whether you choose to use a commercial product or open-source anti-virus tool, it is absolutely something you need to use. This is the minimally needed level of system security. Once installed, ideally, it should be invisible until there's a security problem it can't prevent or solve.   Backups You need to have at least a minimal level of ...

Typescript - It might not be easier, but but it's surely different

Typescript is a statically typed language, that is a superset of JavaScript. I've had the discussions and debates about that aspect of the language. I am all for static typing. Any way my tools can help me be better is alright by me. So I avoid the ' any ' type designation and make sure I have guards on ' unknown ' types, as much as I can.  Any  does not carry any useful type information, while unknown does, and allows it to enforce type checking.  Anything can be assigned to a variable of type unknown , but an unknown value cannot be assigned to variables of other types without explicit type assertion or narrowing. Similarly, no operations are permitted on an unknown value until its type is refined. This behavior ensures type safety and prevents runtime errors. (Refined with help from google). I bring this up because I was arguing with the compiler recently because I'd assumed both made no use on any type information in any circumstance - because I haven't ...

You don't really know who you're talking to online...

The following is a story that I think highlights the assumptions that get you into trouble online... https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/threat-insight/i-knew-you-were-trouble-ta456-targets-defense-contractor-alluring-social-media This is particularly scary since we found so much utility in online connections during the pandemic and out of necessity, started trusting more online. Please note the timeline for this breach - it was a long, slow process, a key factor in many 'cons'. "Build trust" is a key first step, once someone has identified you as a party. You think...you're convinced you know who your talking to, but if you don't triangulate the identity with some non-online, ideally in-person information, you shouldn't trust. And even if you do get what seems like real-life confirmations of identity, you must look at questioning motives, needs, and keeping danger at arms-length. Online includes email, texting (sms), application chatbots, voice communicati...