CyBOK — The Cybersecurity Body of Knowledge

From secure coding practices to managing third-party components and responding to vulnerabilities in production, building secure software requires more than just finding bugs. It demands a comprehensive approach that spans the entire software lifecycle. This episode explores the Secure Software Lifecycle, or SSDL, the processes and practices that help organizations develop, deploy, and maintain software that upholds the core principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We speak with CyBOK Secure Software Lifecycle Topic Guide author Laurie Williams for insighits into the topic.

The purpose of the Distributed Systems Security chapter is to introduce the different classes of distributed systems categorising them into two broad categories of decentralised distributed systems (without central coordination) and the coordinated resource/services type of distributed systems. Subsequently, each of these distributed system categories is expounded for the conceptual mechanisms providing their characteristic functionalities prior to discussing the security issues pertinent to these systems. We speak with CyBOK Distributed Systems Security author Neeraj Suri for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Privacy and Online Rights chapter is to introduce system designers to the concepts and technologies that are used to engineer systems that inherently protect users’ privacy. We aim to provide designers with the ability to identify privacy problems, to describe them from a technical perspective, and to select adequate technologies to eliminate, or at least, mitigate these problems. We speak with CyBOK Privacy and Online Rights Knowledge Area author Carmela Troncoso for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Operating Systems & Virtualisation Security chapter is to introduce the principles, primitives and practices for ensuring security at the operating system and hypervisor levels. We see that the challenges related to operating system security have evolved over the past few decades, even if the principles have stayed mostly the same. We speak with CyBOK Operating Systems & Virtualisation Security author Herbert Bos for an introductory overview of the topic.

The Authentication, Authorisation & Accountability (AAA) chapter presents the general foundations of access control and some significant instantiations that have emerged as IT kept spreading into new application areas. It will survey modes of user authentication and the way they are currently deployed, authentication protocols for the web, noting how new use cases have led to a shift from authentication to authorisation protocols, and the formalisation of authentication properties as used in today’s protocol analysis tools. On accountability, the focus is on the management and protection of audit logs. We speak with CyBOK Authentication, Authorisation & Accountability (AAA) author Dieter Gollmann for an introductory overview of the topic.

The Forensics chapter provides a technical overview of digital forensic techniques and capabilities, and to put them into a broader perspective with regard to other related areas in the cybersecurity domain. The discussion on legal aspects of digital forensics is limited only to general principles and best practices, as the specifics of the application of these principles tend to vary across jurisdictions. We speak with CyBOK Forensics author Vassil Roussev for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Software Security chapter is to provide a structured overview of known categories of software implementation vulnerabilities, and of techniques that can be used to prevent or detect such vulnerabilities, or to mitigate their exploitation. We speak with CyBOK Software Security Knowledge Area author Frank Piessens for an introductory overview of the topic.

After nearly 40 years of research and development, the Security Operations and Incident Management domain has reached a sufficient maturity to be deployed in many environments. We speak with CyBOK Security Operations and Incident Management Knowledge Area author Hervé Debar for an introductory overview of the topic.