Security and Usability book review


I just finished reading the book Security and Usability a compilation of many papers about this topic. And like all books that are like this there are always good parts and bad parts, this also applies to this one. There are some really good chapters that teach you new stuff and some chapters that are quite boring. Because they are scientific papers some chapters are hard to read and I would by now means describe it as a casual easy to read book that you can just enjoy like Bruces Beyond Fear. But it still touches a lot of interesting topics that I think a well educated person in IT should know about, like graphical passwords and biometrics. Another really good point is that it is not only written by scientist but also by people from industry that describe how they solved problems in the real world. I was pleasantly surprised that also some Open Source projects where described. Because of this it is not a classical collection of "boring" papers. Unfortunately the book is five years old and so some topics have already been solved or not really applicable anymore, so maybe some selective reading is at hand. I also found some errors in the book and tried to get them fixed but I got no reply from the authors, so I am assuming that there is no interest in this book anymore. Despite this, it is still a really good book and really good read, and you can just have it lying around and read a chapter once in a while.

1 comment:

Matt said...

Be good to get a revised version of the book. o'Reilly might release an updated version considering this is 5 years old now?