`If you're even thinking of doing any security engineering, you need to
read this book'
Bruce Schneier
`Even after two years on the
shelf, Security Engineering remains the most important security text published
in the last several years'
Information security Magazine
The second edition
is now out! You can now order it from Amazon.com
and Amazon.co.uk.
You can download the first edition for free by chapters:
The foreword, preface and other front matter
Following enquiries from blind students, Jose C. Lacal has contributed these MP3 files so you can listen to the book's chapters on your favorite MP3 player. So far we have the preface, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 6, and chapter 7.
My goal in making the first edition freely available five years after publication was twofold. First, I wanted to reach the widest possible audience, especially among poor students. Second, I am a pragmatic libertarian on free culture and free software issues; I think that many publishers (especially of music and software) are too defensive of copyright. (My colleague David MacKay found that putting his book on coding theory online actually helped its sales. Book publishers are getting the message faster than the music or software folks.) I expect to put the second edition online too in a few years.
If you own the first edition of my book, I hope you liked it enough to upgrade to the second edition. I also have online errata for the first edition here. These have all been applied to the second edition - but there's a lot of new material too. The book has gone up from about 640 pages to about 900.
There are reviews of the first edition, which was translated into Japanese, Chinese and Polish.
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