CONTENTS - Emerald

most productive things for an attacker to look for. These are past experience with similar
systems, unclear design, `omniscient' security controls which can be circumvented,
implicit sharing due to incomplete interface design, deviations from the policy and protection
model, wrong assumptions about initial conditions, system speci c anomalies,
operational shortcuts, poor development practices and implementation errors. These
are discussed with many references, and used to support a aw hypothesis methodology
for systematic penetration testing (i.e., attack).
`E-MAIL SECURITY | HOW TO KEEP YOUR ELECTRONIC MES-
SAGES PRIVATE'
BSchneier
J Wiley and Sons, ISBN 0-471-05318-X
Bruce Schneier's latest book provides a good basic introduction to email security.
He starts o with a discussion of privacy and email; the threat model ranges from
personal enemies to governments, and the modus operandi can extend from router
attacks to tra c analysis.
This sets the stage for a discussion of security tools and mechanisms, from anonymous
remailers to encryption. This is not as technical as in his book `Applied Cryptography',
but aims to give aworking knowledge of PEM and PGP. He discusses some
of the controversy surrounding the latter product, and describes how to set it up and
use it.
The appendices include the PGP documentation, and the RFC's which specify
PEM. This book should appeal to all security managers involved in getting their companies
on to the Internet, as well as to individuals who want to understand the practicalities
of email encryption.
`DATABASE SECURITY'
Silvano Castano, Mariagrazia Fugini, Giancarlo Martella, Pierangela Samarati
Addison-Wesley, 1994; ISBN 0-201-59375-0
This book covers database security, and much more. It starts o with an introduction
to database technology, and continues to provide a grounding in modern computer
security concepts, from abstract access control models through to the gritty detail of
elded products such asRACF and a number of multilevel Unices.
Having dedicated a little over two hundred pages to this foundation, it goes on
to spend the same again on examining the various problems encountered in building
secure database systems and to describe a number of experimental solutions. The
various mechanisms used in existing multilevel systems | integrity lock, kernelised,
replicated and trusted subject architectures | are described rst, and experimental
multilevel systems such as SeaView are compared with commercially available products.
Next, there are chapters devoted to statistical security techniques and intrusion
detection, and nally the last chapter gives an extensive overview of current research
directions, including active and object-oriented databases, message lters, ORION and
SORION, and models by Bertino-Wiegand and Millen-Lunt. In conclusion, this is a
thorough book, and a perfectly suitable introduction for graduate students wishing to
do work in the eld.
49