Recommended Security Reading
dfir.org
dfir.org
My recommendations would add:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Codebreakers-Comprehensive-Communi... by David Kahn. Many stories of the whole history of secret communications, with lessons in op-sec, not changing the codes frequently enough, they can't possibly break this.
The John LaCarre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Carr%C3%A9 books. Do you remember the point where someone says to Smiley "There is no reason to think that they tapped the phone" to which Smiley replies "There is Every reason".
A must read, I tell my students in my Security Awareness training classes is The Cuckoo's Egg http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/.... Examples like default service accounts on Dec Vax with username Field and password Service. Note when this is written and are our habits really any better with junk hung on the internet? Concepts pioneered in his book, as effective as they are, are not practiced. Note the alarms going off, ignored, at a large retailer last thanksgiving. Or another retailer recently, "Wait, what, we are being attacked? I didn't feel anything".
Most vulnerable is the thinking "Well, they can't get our X because <thing we did>". I have a matrix of attacker motives and what they are after. There motives and targetsyou haven't thought of.
I don't know if this is a recommendation, an anti-recommendation, or an excuse.
I hear there's an alternate title it's being published under now though, so look for the author, Cliff Stoll.
The only cryptography book I can recommend is _Cryptography Engineering_ (nee _Practical Cryptography_, which is virtually identical).
You would be surprised how few professional security people know anything about cryptography. It certainly isn't a qualifier.
I generally have a hard time with any book list for security people that includes, for instance, _Design Patterns_.
Would you please elaborate on this point? I am not familar with that book and so do not know why its inclusion reflects poorly on the list (or the list author's assessments).
It has absolutely no relevance to software security, even in terms of background material about computer science. (It's actually of dubious relevance to programmers in general). It's one of a couple books on this list that give it the flavor of "I just typed up my bookshelf".
It doesn't help that the summary is "Required reading for any serious programmer".
Certainly the book is tremendously useful for ObjC programmers because Apple incorporated most of these patterns into Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. And as someone who has done code review with junior Android developers, I wish that more devs read it. When a security researcher refers to a MITM attack or SQL injection, this higher level concepts mean something and it enables clearer conversation. That's what design patterns provide to software developers.
Of the original GoF patterns, which specific ones make it easier to discuss SQL injection?
That doesn't seem to be the claim made in the parent comment. I read it as a far weaker, "In much the same way that security researchers label antipatterns that enable attacks and that makes it easier to talk about security, the GOF label patterns that make it easier to talk about design."
I don't know that the parent comment makes a good case for relevance of this claim, though, since - as you've been more focused on - this list is supposed to be more specifically for (FTA) "topics within computer security, digital forensics, incident response, malware analysis, and reverse engineering." I suppose if the system you're reverse engineering made substantial use of GoF design patterns, familiarity with them would probably help, but that seems a little bit of a stretch.
GoF doesn't really help with any of the above. What GoF helps with is shoring up weak languages that don't have the proper stuff to begin with. It talks about abstractions and how to build them.
What is useful from a security professional's point of view is to learn how to puncture abstractions. Finding flaws such as information leakage between abstractions. This is a hard mind-set to come to.
GoF will not help you with any of this.
(In general, I find it a recurring problem on HN - and to some degree similar fora - that I am not sure what conversational role a poster intended their comment to serve; I wonder if there is a good way to address that...)
And we could discuss I think Norvig's claim is often read (not sure if intended) slightly stronger than is merited quite a bit. I might go the other way, as I think Norvig is really quite gentle in making his points.
So not disagreeing with your comment, and perhaps I did hang my comment on the wrong post.
Regarding GoF, I think having more well-known constructs to reference can provide some value even when those constructs are motivated by overcoming limitations that may not be present in a given context. Picking more broadly useful constructs will provide more value, but you may or may not be able to get there from here, and certainly (perhaps unfortunately) enough people still find themselves coding in contexts where GoF patterns can be directly useful.
The parent comment is responding to @tptacek's original comment:
> (It's actually of dubious relevance to programmers in general).
Where 'it' is the Design Patterns book. That's a more broad statement than just whether or not security researchers needs to read the book. The parent to your post replied to that:
> I agree that _Design Patterns_ has little to do with security, but I think you are being a bit hard on it from a programming perspective.
So, in summary:
tptacek: Design Patterns has no relevance to security. It also
has dubious relevance to all other programming.
skue: It doesn't have relevance to security, but I feel that it
does have relevance to programming in general.Great! That means I could just learn to work with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch and skip the tedious exposition.
I would try to explain why I've never been able to pick up a patterns book without eventually throwing it against a wall, and why I prefer to encounter my patterns in the wild as I work on actual code, where I can poke and prod them and watch how they behave in practice, but it's already been throughly explained and even given a name, The Monad Tutorial Fallacy:
http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuitio...
Sounds to me like your junior Android developers might be learning patterns just fine: They trip over one in practice, and then they learn about it with the help of their teacher. This is how learning works. There is no royal road to geometry, and beginners don't become experts overnight just by reading the right book.
Google for [Norvig patterns] or [Norvig GoF].
I have now heard from several people about applied crypto being outdated and replaced with crypto engineering. I have since ordered the engineering book and based on initial reading will likely replace applied with crypto engineering once I am done (I only post books I have fully read).
I am not sure about the criticism of intro to modern crypto and design patterns though. I learned alot from both of them in my computer science classses that used them and the information is still vaulable and useful to me.
http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cryp...
I really think people should avoid that book.
I really hope people can put together a web security book (and free) that is up-to-date. To me, the Tangled Web does a pretty good job, but there are still nuts and bolts missing or wordy.
OWASP wiki is okay-ish but I really hate digging the wiki just to find the information is either incorrect or outdated.
Learning security on a topic will make you so much better at what you do and it will make you learn internal details AND best practices.
The things you build will be BETTER not just more secure
I'm really tired of reporting account hijacks and Remote code executions to startups who look at me blankly when I explain what I did
Any list without it, is a list without it.
> I find your lack of trust disturbing.
Here's a strategy, I'll organize a visit to our local technical bookstore, see what new and used gems await me like a treasure hunt to secure such dead tree scrolls.
(And yes, I know the best way is to get a PhD building the thing, but I'm interested in learning nonetheless )
Wrong.
The dinosaur book is written by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne and is called "Operating System Concepts"
Seems like the author did not put too much care into this list.
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Unix-Internet-Security-Editi...
For people really interested in crypto there's obiously HAC [1].
For people interested in something that is updated each year: LNCS from DIMVA and RAID are quite good for understanding the problems or future problems and their solutions.
And of course phrack?
Looks pretty well written from a quick look at it, but I'd love to hear some thoughts before committing to reading through it.
http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/0321444426/samplechapt...
A real hacker would tell you that all these books are really not needed.
Who's saying that these "need" to be read? Maybe the HN title has been changed in the meantime, but this is entirely presented as a list of resources. You're not going to argue against reading books as a component of education, are you? And I don't even want to know where that "real hacker" stuff is coming from. That word hasn't meant anything concrete for over a decade.