Security News > 2024 > February > Security is hard because it has to be right all the time? Yeah, like everything else

Systems Approach One refrain you often hear is that security must be built in from the ground floor; that retrofitting security to an existing system is the source of design complications, or worse, outright flawed designs.

Is there something about security that explains our challenges? Or, to put it another way, is there anything about security that makes it fundamentally different from scalability, availability, or any other design requirement when we talk about large systems such as the Internet?

From the systems perspective, the key is to abstract the algorithm in such a way that you can then design a system that builds upon it.

In our work to bring a systems perspective to 5G, I found that the lion's share of attention in standard treatments of 5G is placed on the coding algorithm and underlying information theory, with the rationale for the architecture of the communication system built around that algorithm often lacking.

That's not to say today's security systems are poorly designed, but in describing those systems, emphasis should also be put on the design that is able to take advantage of the algorithms.

Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie are the authors behind Computer Networks: A Systems Approach and the related Systems Approach series of books.

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https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/02/25/security_not_different/