Problem - Kevin Tafuro

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Preface
We don’t think we need to tell you that writing secure software is incredibly difficult,
even for the experts. We’re not going to waste any time trying to convince you
to start thinking about security—we assume you’re already doing that.
Our goal here is to provide you with a rich set of code samples that you can use to
help secure the C and C++ programs you write, for both Unix * and Windows environments.
There are already several other books out there on the topic of writing secure software.
Many of them are quite good, but they universally focus on the fundamentals,
not code. That is, they cover basic secure programming principles, and they usually
explain how to design for security and perform risk assessments. Nevertheless, none
of them show you by example how to do such things as SSL-enable your applications
properly, which can be surprisingly difficult.
Fundamental software security skills are important, and everybody should master
them. But, in this book, we assume that you already have the basics under your belt.
We do talk about design considerations, but we do so compactly, focusing instead
on getting the implementation details correct. If you need a more in-depth treatment
of basic design principles, there are now several good books on this topic, including
Building Secure Software (Addison Wesley). In addition, on this book’s web site, we
provide links to background resources that are available on the Internet.
More Than Just a Book
There is no way we could cover all the topics we wanted to cover in a reasonable
number of pages. In this book, we’ve had to focus on the recipes and technologies
we thought would be most universally applicable. In addition, we’ve had to focus on
* We know Linux is not a true Unix, but we will lump it in there throughout this book for the sake of convenience.
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