Engineering Information Security: The Application of Systems Engineering Concepts to Achieve Information Assurance

This book considers the complete security lifecycle of products and services starting with requirements and policy development and progressing through deployment, operations, and decommissioning.

Engineering Information Security covers all aspects of information security using a systematic engineering approach and focuses on the viewpoint of how to control access to information. Unlike other books that focus on security mechanisms, threats, and vulnerabilities, this book presents a methodology for addressing security concerns in any organization. The methodology is based on a set of concepts that are designed to methodically examine, analyse, and document objectives, and the functional and performance capabilities that need to exist to achieve the stated goals.

This book begins by considering the importance of information security. Legal, technical, competitive, criminal, and consumer forces and influences that are rapidly changing our information dependent society are also discussed. Concepts of systems engineering are explored, as well as the value they provide to new products and services along with the maintenance and evolution to existing products and services. A discussion of security services follow along with what technical and procedural controls instantiate these services. Network protocols are examined focusing on exploitable vulnerabilities. An in-depth discussion of computer security capabilities is provided followed by consideration of modern networking security controls. The book concludes by discussing operations security as part of information security governance.

This new edition includes:

• Fifteen new sections throughout
• Additional discussions on SCADA, Cloud, Sensor, Ad Hoc networks, and HTTP Basic and Digest authentication
• Coverage of code reviews, code scanning tools and testing, and SSL VPNs
• Instructor resources include lecture slides, example quizzes, assignments, and a final examination
• Seven online appendices that include: example information security policies, security requirements, a security Statement of Work, and risk management tables suitable for SQL implementation

Over time, the technologies used for processing, storing, and communicating information have changed dramatically and rapidly. By presenting a systems engineering approach to information security, this book will assist security practitioners to cope with these rapid changes.

Stuart Jacobs is a Lecturer at Boston University, teaching graduate courses on Network and Computer Security and Enterprise Information Security, along with advising on security curricula issues. Mr. Jacobs also serves as an Industry Security Subject Matter Expert for the Alliance for the Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) and as the Technical Editor of the ATIS Technical Report “Information and Communications Security for NGN Converged Services IP Networks and Infrastructure” and ITU-T M.3410, “Guidelines and Requirements for Security Management Systems”. Stuart holds an MSc degree and CISSP Certification, and is a member of IEEE and IEEE Computer Society, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC)2, Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) and InfraGuard.