Once more, the die has been cast. Yesterday, I sent the final version of the manuscript of my second book to Springer.

The title is Ten Laws of Security. For 15 years, together with my previous security team, I have defined and refined a set of ten laws for security. These laws are simple but powerful. Over the years, when meeting other security experts, solution providers, potential customers, and students, I discovered that these laws were an excellent communication tool. These rules allowed benchmarking quickly whether both parties shared the same vision for security. Many meetings successfully started by me introducing these laws, which helped build reciprocal respect and trust between teams. Over time, I found that these laws were also an excellent educational tool. Each law can introduce different technologies and principles of security. They constitute an entertaining way to present security to new students or to introduce security to non-experts. Furthermore, these laws are mandatory heuristics that should drive any design of secure systems. There is no valid, rational reason for a system to violate one of these rules. The laws can be used as a checklist for a first-level sanity check.

Each chapter of this book addresses one law. The first part of the chapter always starts with examples. These anecdotes either illustrate an advantageous application of the law or outline the consequences of not complying with it. The second part of the chapter explores different security principles addressed by the law. Each chapter introduces, at least, one security technology or methodology that illustrates the law, or that is paramount to the law. From each law, the last section deduces some associated rules that are useful when designing or assessing a security system. As in my previous book, inserts, entitled “The Devil is in the details,” illustrate the gap between theory and real-world security.

The book should be available this summer.