Security

Computer security (also cybersecurity or IT security) protects software, systems, and networks from adversarial threats that may seek to access information without authorisation, damage or steal hardware/software/data, or disrupt services.

Security is one of the most important parts of modern software engineering, because of how ubiquitous computers are. Our systems now must be secure by necessity.¹

Basics

One problem with modern distributed systems is that there are multiple nodes connected by a network, so there’s a larger attack surface. Some challenges:

• Nodes may be compromised and behave maliciously.
• Nodes may alter, insert, or drop messages.
• Nodes may send different messages to different nodes.

These can be mitigated by Byzantine fault tolerant systems.

Sub-pages

• Cryptography
  • Public-key cryptography
  • Cryptographic hash function
• Distributed systems
  • Core protocols
    • SSL
    • TLS
    • HTTPS
    • SSH
  • Byzantine fault tolerance
    • Bitcoin
    • PBFT

Resources

• OWASP
• ECE568 — Computer Security

Footnotes

1. “Focus on trustworthy systems, rather than just secure components.” - Prof Kevin Fu ↩