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Secure System Design Principles

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Secure System Design Principles are fundamental guidelines for developing systems with security in mind. Organizations use these principles to build and maintain secure and resilient systems, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access or exploitation. Some key security design principles include: 1) Defense-in-depth, which involves applying multiple security layers to provide redundancy and protect against single points of failure; 2) Least privilege, which restricts access rights for users, processes, and systems to the minimum required to perform their tasks; 3) Segmentation and isolation, which separate critical systems and sensitive information from other parts of the network to limit potential exposure to threats; and 4) Security by design, which advocates embedding security elements during the early stages of system development, rather than add them as an afterthought.

Guide: Understanding Secure System Design Principles

What is Secure System Design Principles:
Secure System Design Principles are crucial set of guidelines that are followed to design secure computing systems. These principles are designed to ensure various aspects such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. These principles generally include 'Least Privilege', 'Fail-Safe Defaults', 'Economy of Mechanism', 'Complete Mediation', 'Open Design', 'Separation of Privilege', 'Least Common Mechanism' and 'Psychological Acceptability'.

Why it is important:
Given the continuous rise in cyber attacks and data breaches, Secure System Design Principles become critical to ensuring security at every level of system design. Following these principles help in minimizing potential vulnerabilities, reducing the attack surface and enhancing the overall security posture of the system.

How it works:
These principles work by providing a strong framework for security during the system design phase. Whether it is limiting user privileges, or ensuring fail-safe defaults, these principles guide the security measures implemented during the design stage. Regular assessment and updating of these regulations further helps in maintaining a robust and secure system.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Secure System Design Principles
Understanding the theoretical concepts alone is not enough to correctly answer questions about Secure System Design Principles in an exam. Practical understanding and being able to relate principles with real world scenarios is equally important. One of the key tips is to make sure that you understand each principle and how it contributes to the overall system security. Each principle is designed to protect against specific potential threats, so understanding these can help in correctly identifying the principle that is best suitable to mitigate a given threat.

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CISSP - Security Architecture and Engineering Example Questions

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Question 1

Your company is designing an authentication system that will require users to authenticate with biometric and token-based methods. Which secure system design principle is being used?

Correct Answer: Defense in depth

Defense in depth is a design principle that employs multiple layers of security controls to protect a system. By requiring both biometric and token-based authentication methods, the authentication system has multiple layers of protection. Economy of mechanism, fail-safe defaults, complete mediation, and psychological acceptability are all design principles, but they do not apply to this dual authentication system. Open design refers to the openness of the design process and the principle that security should not rely on the secrecy of the design.

Question 2

You are a security consultant working with a company that wants to implement a secure system for their new web application. What design principle should be prioritized?

Correct Answer: Least privilege

Least privilege is a design principle that ensures users are granted the minimum access required to perform their duties, limiting the potential impact of compromised accounts. Fail-open and fail-close relate to system behavior during failure, not design principles. Single point of failure and wide attack surface are vulnerabilities, not design principles. Permissive access is the opposite of least privilege, which would increase security risks.

Question 3

A company wants to implement a security design that prohibits users from accessing resources they should not have access to. Which design principle should they follow?

Correct Answer: Complete mediation

Complete mediation ensures that every access request to a resource is checked against an access control mechanism before allowing or denying access. This principle helps prevent unauthorized access. Economy of mechanism, fail-safe defaults, least common mechanism, psychological acceptability, and open design are all design principles, but they do not specifically address access control.

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