Ross Anderson
Author of Security Engineering
The textbook, and the economics of why security fails
Rating
94Impact score
Domains
Security engineeringSecurity economicsBanking systems
Scouting report
Cambridge professor who wrote Security Engineering, the closest thing the field has to a canonical text, and gave away earlier editions free online. Founded the security-economics research programme with the observation that systems fail because the people who could fix them are not the people who bear the loss. Spent years demonstrating that bank chip-and-PIN systems were weaker than the banks told courts they were. Died in 2024.
Curator’s note
If you only read one book on this list, it is this one.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Ross Anderson by Markus Kuhn, licensed CC BY 3.0.
Sources
- 01Ross J. Anderson en.wikipedia.org
- 02Security Engineering, third edition cl.cam.ac.uk