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Security Warrior
The book comes lightly packaged in a metaphor about the training of samurai. A security warrior, it is said, must avoid a "superficial study of the subject" because that leads to a "deterioration of the samurai spirit." To avoid this, the authors plunge deeply into a wide variety of ways that attackers might break into your system. The book is meant to help you "know your enemy" and "see through an attacker's eyes."
This chestbeating fluff disappears pretty quickly because the authors dive into reading assembly code in the first chapter and start talking about the registers of the CPU by page 4. The rest of the first part of the book explores reverse engineering software by reading assembly dumps and using good tools to decipher it.
After poking around in binary code, they turn to the bits floating around the network. Chapters 6 through 10 explore how to sit on one end of the Internet and pry your way into another computer. Chapters 11 through 17 dive deeper into the specific defenses of platforms like UNIX, Windows, SOAP and SQL. The rest of the book, Chapters 18 through 22, explore how to figure out just what the attackers may be doing by setting up honeypots and log analysis tools.
Covering all of these topics in 531 pages is clearly not possible and the book reads more like a survey or a catalog of what can go wrong. If you use PHP, for instance, as a frontend to your database, you might want to be sure that some "script kiddie" won't slip in some extra SQL in the form fields. Each topic isn't built up from some bedrock foundation with perfect mathematical pedagogy, it's just defined as a list of bad things that you should avoid doing.
The authors seem to be aware of how this might be misinterpreted. There are many good tricks in the book and it wouldn't be hard to rename it Al K Da's 1337 Haxor Tips . So the authors stress how learning about the enemy is the only way to defeat the hordes.
I think the problem is deeper and more philosophical. There's no way to prove a negative. There are no good mathematical tools that make it easy to prove statements like P!=NP or big numbers can't be factored quickly. In a larger sense, it's not really possible to prove that someone can't break into a system. A more traditional, ground-up approach to the topic can offer some assurances, but books like this one are always necessary. Anyone doing battle against unknowable and unpredictable adversaries must look between the cracks.
If you look at it this way, the book is a good collection of tips and hints that will help someone keep their network a bit more secure. It doesn't provide a deep, elegant and rigorous explication of the topic, but I don't think that is possible. It's a great collection of tricks that should be part of a good warrior's training.
Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and Policing Online Games . You can purchase Security Warrior from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Starts off with a samurai metaphor? The samurai class is dead! they could not survive technology. They have been replaced by Japanese riot cops practicing Aikido, a fighting philosophy where there is neither victor nor vanquished.
This does not bode well for security experts...
The internet sucks now, anyways. Just look at Slashdot if you don't believe me.
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