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“The Art of Security” was a book I wrote back in 1998 which unfortunately (for me at least) ended up classified. This wasn’t for any super-secret reasons, it just happened to be part of my contract at the time.

The book was written to be a contrast to the other security books of the time which were all weighing in at well over 1,000 pages and a couple of kilogrammes each. I wanted a short and readable book made up of short chapters and vignettes; each of which would teach some aspect of security. The book didn’t teach anyone how to create secure code, or to design the perfect DMZ but it did aim to teach people why they should look at things in certain ways and hopefully how to think a little more about the big picture. Mostly, it was about Castles.

A few people and a couple of publishers have asked if I would rewrite and update the book so – I shall see how that goes. I had agreed to do it for O’Reilly but then I went and got ill and for a while lost all motivation to do anything.

For now I will use this site to post new new security-related musings. Probably not very often.

Michael Lawrie.