// Prerequisites
What to read before Building Secure and Reliable Systems
If Building Secure and Reliable Systems feels too steep at advanced level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2023
Security Chaos Engineering
Kelly Shortridge and Aaron Rinehart on treating security as a property of complex adaptive systems: instead of preventing failure, you continuously simulate it, and design the organization to learn from each result.
Advanced5/5Kelly Shortridge, Aaron Rinehart02 · 2020
Security Engineering
Ross Anderson's comprehensive textbook on the design of secure systems, covering protocols, access control, side channels, economics of security, and policy.
Advanced5/5Ross Anderson03 · 2021
Designing Secure Software
Loren Kohnfelder, the original PKI author, on how to weave security thinking through requirements, design, implementation and operations rather than bolt it on at the end.
Intermediate5/5Loren Kohnfelder04 · 2012
Practical Malware Analysis
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
Intermediate5/5Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig05 · 2013
The Practice of Network Security Monitoring
Richard Bejtlich's NSM playbook: how to deploy collection sensors, validate that you actually see what you think you see, and build detection workflows around open-source tools.
Intermediate5/5Richard Bejtlich06 · 2014
Threat Modeling
Adam Shostack's practitioner-oriented introduction to threat modeling: STRIDE, attack trees, and how to fit the practice into a real software-development lifecycle.
Intermediate5/5Adam Shostack07 · 2020
Container Security
Liz Rice's first-principles introduction to how Linux containers actually work — namespaces, cgroups, capabilities, seccomp, image layering — and the security implications that fall out of those mechanics.
Intermediate4/5Liz Rice08 · 2010
Cryptography Engineering
A working engineer's introduction to cryptography that takes implementation pitfalls more seriously than most.
Intermediate4/5Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, Tadayoshi Kohno