CyBOK — The Cybersecurity Body of Knowledge

From secure coding practices to managing third-party components and responding to vulnerabilities in production, building secure software requires more than just finding bugs. It demands a comprehensive approach that spans the entire software lifecycle. This episode explores the Secure Software Lifecycle, or SSDL, the processes and practices that help organizations develop, deploy, and maintain so...

In this topic guide we set out the present state of thinking on how to combine the perpectives of cyber security and safety and reliability cultures. In particular, we focus on a structured approach to defending safety critical systems, with mechanisms already in place for safety and reliability. In other words, we do not start with the assumption of greenfield sites and recognise that security cu...

Adoption of cloud computing has accelerated the digital transformation of organisations globally, supported by a corresponding transformation in cybersecurity. With the migration of applications from on-premise data centres to the public cloud and their integration with edge environments, the threats to processing sensitive data have changed. The cloud platform's built-in security has mitigated th...

Cybersecurity, like other industries, has seen an explosion in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies in recent years. AI and ML can help to automate tasks. Data-driven approaches in general can draw patterns from vast volumes of data far quicker than humans are can. This episode summarises the state of AI for security at the time of writing and highlights s...

The Security Economics Knowledge Guide introduces some of the most impactful ways economics has helped to shed light on cybersecurity problems and frame solutions that blend private and public action. The guide focuses on the organizational, rather than individual, perspective, which is where the majority of scholarly activity has focused. The author of this knowledge guides shares canonical secur...

Machine Learning (ML) has rapidly become a fundamental technology that underpins count- less applications, from natural language processing and computer vision to fraud detection and personalized recommendations. In recent years, there has been a growing understanding of how to use ML in security contexts, leading to the development of advanced tools and techniques for detecting and preventing mal...

The ubiquity of networking allows us to connect all sorts of devices and gain unprecedented access to a whole range of applications and services anytime, anywhere. However, our heavy reliance on networking technology also makes it an attractive target for malicious users who are willing to compromise the security of our communications and/or cause disruption to services that are critical for our d...

The Formal Methods knowledge area surveys the most relevant topics in formal methods for security. As a discipline, formal methods address foundations, methods and tools, based on mathematics and logic, for rigourously developing and reasoning about computer systems, whether they be software, hardware, or a combination of the two. The application of formal methods to security has emerged over rece...

The Applied Cryptography knowledge area This document provides a broad introduction to the field of cryptography, focusing on applied aspects of the subject. It complements the CyBoK document [1] which focuses on formal aspects of cryptography (including definitions and proofs) and on describing the core cryptographic primitives. That said, formal aspects are highly relevant when considering appli...

The purpose of the Web and Mobile Security chapter is to provide an overview of security mechanisms, attacks and defences in modern web and mobile ecosystems. Web and mobile security have become the primary means through which many users interact with the Internet and computing systems. Hence, their impact on overall information security is significant due to the sheer prevalence of web and mobile...

The purpose of the Law and Regulation chapter is to provide a snapshot of legal and regulatory topics that merit consideration when conducting various activities in the field of cyber security such as: security management, risk assessment, security testing, forensic investigation, research, product and service development, and cyber operations (defensive and offensive). The hope is to provide a fr...

The purpose of the Adversarial Behaviours chapter is to provide an overview of the malicious operations that are happening on the Internet today. The chapter discusses how these frameworks can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop effective mitigations against malicious online operations. We speak with CyBOK Distributed Systems Security author Gianluca Stringhini for an introductory...

The purpose of the Distributed Systems Security chapter covers a broad range of topics from trusted computing to Trojan circuits. To classify these topics we follow the different hardware abstraction layers as introduced by the Y-chart of Gajski & Kuhn. We speak with CyBOK Hardware Security author Ingrid Verbauwhede for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Distributed Systems Security chapter is to introduce the different classes of distributed systems categorising them into two broad categories of decentralised distributed systems (without central coordination) and the coordinated resource/services type of distributed systems. Subsequently, each of these distributed system categories is expounded for the conceptual mechanisms pro...

The purpose of the Privacy and Online Rights chapter is to introduce system designers to the concepts and technologies that are used to engineer systems that inherently protect users’ privacy. We aim to provide designers with the ability to identify privacy problems, to describe them from a technical perspective, and to select adequate technologies to eliminate, or at least, mitigate these problem...

The purpose of the Network Security chapter is to explain the challenges associated with securing a network under a variety of attacks for a number of networking technologies and widely used security protocols, along with emerging security challenges and solutions. This chapter aims to provide the necessary background in order to understand other knowledge areas. An understanding of basic networki...

The purpose of the Operating Systems & Virtualisation Security chapter is to introduce the principles, primitives and practices for ensuring security at the operating system and hypervisor levels. We see that the challenges related to operating system security have evolved over the past few decades, even if the principles have stayed mostly the same. We speak with CyBOK Operating Systems & Virtual...

The Human Factors chapter presents a foundational understanding of the role of human factors in cyber security. One key aspect of this is how to design security that is usable and acceptable to a range of human actors, for instance, end-users, administrators and developers. This knowledge area also introduces a broader organisational and societal perspective on security that has emerged over the p...

The Authentication, Authorisation & Accountability (AAA) chapter presents the general foundations of access control and some significant instantiations that have emerged as IT kept spreading into new application areas. It will survey modes of user authentication and the way they are currently deployed, authentication protocols for the web, noting how new use cases have led to a shift from authenti...

The Risk Management and Governance chapter explains the fundamental principles of cyber risk assessment and management and their role in risk governance, expanding on these to cover the knowledge required to gain a working understanding of the topic and its sub-areas. We speak with CyBOK Risk Management and Governance author Pete Burnap for an introductory overview of the topic.

The Forensics chapter provides a technical overview of digital forensic techniques and capabilities, and to put them into a broader perspective with regard to other related areas in the cybersecurity domain. The discussion on legal aspects of digital forensics is limited only to general principles and best practices, as the specifics of the application of these principles tend to vary across juris...

Cyber-Physical Systems Security are engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computation, and physical components. While automatic control systems like the steam governor have existed for several centuries, it is only in the past decades that the automation of physical infrastructures like the power grid, water systems, or chemical reactions have migrate...

The purpose of the Software Security chapter is to provide a structured overview of known categories of software implementation vulnerabilities, and of techniques that can be used to prevent or detect such vulnerabilities, or to mitigate their exploitation. We speak with CyBOK Software Security Knowledge Area author Frank Piessens for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the various aspects of cryptography which we feel should be known to an expert in cyber-security. We speak with CyBOK Cryptography Knowledge Area author Nigel Smart for an introductory overview of the topic.  

After nearly 40 years of research and development, the Security Operations and Incident Management domain has reached a sufficient maturity to be deployed in many environments. We speak with CyBOK Security Operations and Incident Management Knowledge Area author Hervé Debar for an introductory overview of the topic.