Security Architecture
General material on securing an architecture.
4 to work through
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An enterprise platform's security review produces hundreds of findings across dozens of systems, and remediation capacity cannot keep up. What is structurally wrong, and what changes?
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Equifax was breached in 2017 through a vulnerability with a patch available two months earlier. Beyond "patch faster", what architectural and governance failures does that imply?
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The 2019 Capital One breach chained a server-side request forgery to an over-permissive IAM role. Walk the chain, and say which single control would have contained it.
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Your services currently trust anything inside the VPC. A security review says move to zero trust. What changes, and what will it cost you?
2 min answer
15 terms in this topic
Auditability
The ability to reconstruct who did what, to which resource, when, and from where — reliably enough to be relied upon after the fact.
conceptAuthentication
Establishing who a principal is, to a defined level of confidence.
conceptAuthorization
Deciding whether an authenticated principal may perform a specific action on a specific resource.
practiceCompliance Framework
A published set of control requirements an organisation is assessed against, which turns security posture into evidence somebody else will check.
practiceEncryption at Rest and in Transit
Protecting stored data from disclosure if the medium is obtained, and network data from disclosure if the path is observed — two different controls a…
conceptIdentity and Access Management
The system of record for principals, credentials and permissions, and the policy engine that decides what each principal may do.
protocolJSON Web Token
A signed, self-contained token carrying claims, which a service can validate locally without calling the issuer.
conceptLeast Privilege
Granting each identity only the permissions it needs, for only as long as it needs them.
protocolOAuth 2.0
An authorisation framework that lets an application obtain scoped, delegated access to a resource without handling the user's credentials.
protocolOpenID Connect
An identity layer over OAuth 2.0 that adds a signed ID token asserting who the user is and how they authenticated.
practiceOWASP Top Ten
A periodically updated consensus list of the most critical web application security risks, useful as a design-review checklist.
conceptPersonally Identifiable Information
Data relating to an identifiable person — a category far broader than name and address, and the trigger for most regulatory obligation.
practiceSecrets Management
Storing, distributing, rotating and auditing credentials so that they never live in code, images or configuration files.
practiceThreat Modelling
A structured exercise that identifies what can go wrong with a design, before it is built, by walking the system's trust boundaries.
conceptZero Trust
A security model that grants no implicit trust from network position, and authenticates and authorises every request individually.
Neighbouring topics
Authentication
Establishing who a principal is, and how strong that claim needs to be.
Authorization
RBAC, ABAC and ReBAC, and centralising the decision but not the enforcement.
OAuth 2.0 & OIDC
Delegated authorisation, and the identity layer that makes login safe.
Tokens & JWTs
Stateless validation, revocation, and pinning the algorithm.
Identity & Access Management
Workload identity, roles, permission boundaries and usage-based review.
Secrets Management
Runtime injection, dynamic credentials and rotation applications survive.
Encryption
At rest, in transit, and at the application layer — three different threats.
Key Management
Rotation, separation of duty, envelope encryption and crypto-shredding.
Zero Trust
No implicit trust from network position; authorise every request.
Threat Modelling
Walking trust boundaries with STRIDE before anything is built.
OWASP Risks
The recurring web and API risk classes, several of which are design flaws.
Secure API Design
Object-level authorisation, input validation and safe error responses.
Supply Chain Security
Dependencies, SBOMs, build provenance and artefact signing.
Network Security
Segmentation, egress control and limiting lateral movement.
Auditability
Tamper-evident, attributed records that survive async boundaries.
Compliance Frameworks
SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS — scope as an architectural lever.
Privacy Engineering
Minimisation, purpose limitation, and erasure that is implementable.
Data Classification
Knowing which fields are regulated, because every control depends on it.
Security Incident Response
Detection, scoping, containment and notification clocks.