Articles

Ideas and Opinions from the Trenches

There are lots of ways we can optimise what we do, through a data driven approach, but we need to be careful and use critical and creative thinking.

What! Think before coding? WHY?

Why are so many people just diving, straight into the code? A minimum of requirements and design? Perhaps a threat Model?

Software Engineering Security Culture

We need to fix the culture, from top to bottom in the software engineering industry. Here are just some of the issues as I see them and what we should be doing about them.

Threat Modeling Gameplay with EoP

Coming soon to a bookshelf near you, Threat Modeling Gameplay with EoP: A reference manual for spotting threats in software architecture

Games with Purpose - Nov 2022

Some interesting security and creativity games plus a few more

Threat Modeling Remotely with Miro and EoP

Threat modeling with teams is a process that requires visuals, interaction between team members and discussion and so lends itself to everyone being in a room together. This has been quite hard the last two years. It also doesn’t look to be getting any easier, so we should probably get used to it. Here’s how I’ve been doing it with several teams.

Application Security is More than Just Pen Testing

So often organizations believe that Application Security stops at penetration testing and fixing vulnerabilities but it is more than that, penetration testing is the reactive side of things but you also need the proactive aspects of Application Security to reduce the flow.

CAPEC-STRIDE Mapping

Mapping between the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC) from Mitre and the S.T.R.I.D.E. Categories used in Threat Modeling.

OWASP - Application Security Awareness Campaigns

I’ve just launched the first OWASP Application Security Awareness Campaign with 11 Posters of the OWASP Top Ten 2021 project.

Calculating Risk Across Project Real-estate using Graph Analysis

Prioritising remediation of vulnerabilities based on effective impact and risk using PageRank.

Python3 Notes

This is just a collection of notes I’ve made over a period of time to remind me of certain commands or syntax. I will continue adding to this over time. I’m also going to add my Natural Language Processing notes and Machine Learning Notes in a couple of other articles.

Introduction to SAML for Managers

SAML allows your users to be authenticated and authorized without direct interaction with your web site. It does this by creating a trust relationship between the site and a trusted third party who vouches for the identity of the user. This article explains both how this happens and what the additional benefits are.

Introduction to Kerberos for Managers

What is Kerberos? It is an authentication mechanism...

Introduction to Digital Signatures for Managers

What are digital signatures and what do they tell us, what information do they hold? All this and more are explained in this article.

Introduction to SSL for Managers

In this article I am going to outline what SSL is, its building blocks and how it works.

Three Brass Monkeys

In this article I’m going to talk about why we shouldn’t take security for granted, what practices should be part of our process and how the industry may move to enforce this.