// Alternatives
Alternatives to Designing Secure Software
Books in our catalog with overlapping topics and a similar reading level to Designing Secure Software. If Designing Secure Software is the wrong fit at intermediate level, start here.
01 · 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 Shostack02 · 2010
Cryptography Engineering
A working engineer's introduction to cryptography that takes implementation pitfalls more seriously than most.
Intermediate4/5Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, Tadayoshi Kohno03 · 2021
Real-World Cryptography
David Wong's hands-on tour of the cryptographic primitives, protocols and pitfalls that show up in actual production systems, with deliberate attention to TLS, Noise, modern AEAD, and post-quantum.
Intermediate5/5David Wong04 · 2020
Web Security for Developers
Malcolm McDonald's developer-side primer on the OWASP-class issues, framed around real attacks and defended with code patterns rather than vendor products.
Beginner4/5Malcolm McDonald05 · 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 · 2012
Practical Malware Analysis
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
Intermediate5/5Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig07 · 2023
Black Hat GraphQL
Aleks and Farhi on attacking GraphQL specifically: introspection abuse, batching, depth and complexity attacks, auth flaws, and the differences from REST that make GraphQL pentests their own discipline.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi08 · 2023
Intelligence-Driven Incident Response
A practitioner's guide to wiring threat intelligence into the incident response loop, built around the F3EAD cycle rather than tool-of-the-week tutorials.
Intermediate4/5Scott J. Roberts, Rebekah Brown09 · 2022
Cybersécurité
Solange Ghernaouti's broad academic survey of cybersecurity — risk analysis, governance, technical and legal dimensions — the standard French university reference, now in its 7th edition.
Intermediate4/5Solange Ghernaouti10 · 2022
Hacking APIs
Corey Ball's structured approach to attacking REST and GraphQL APIs: enumeration, auth flaws, business logic, mass assignment, and the testing harness around them.
Intermediate4/5Corey J. Ball