Mastering Security by Design provides the deep-dive expertise required to architect secure modern systems and applications, regardless of scale. As a developer, you may find yourself pushed out of your comfort zone, as Security by Design extends far beyond mere programming. Similarly, managers, architects, and business owners will discover that the subtle technical details discussed here can make or break a business if Security by Design is not embedded across the entire organisation.
Goal of this book¶
Target Audience¶
This book is designed for managers, directors, architects, developers, and security enthusiasts. It focuses on designing reliable and secure systems.
It is also suitable for anyone interested in learning how to create secure systems and applications by default.
In person courses¶
If you are based in the Netherlands or Belgium, training is delivered directly by the authors of this book.
Find out more about these workshops
Pay what you can¶
Cybersecurity education shouldn’t be a luxury.
In an industry where online courses are often overpriced and provide little genuine value, we choose a different path.
We believe that critical security knowledge should be open, borderless, and accessible to everyone. True to the spirit of this course, we respect your digital sovereignty: there are no mandatory registrations and there is no invasive tracking. After all, this is a security course.
We don’t want your financial situation to be a barrier to improving your skills or advancing your career. Not everyone can afford the often excessive fees attached to professional cybersecurity training. Financial circumstances should never prevent someone from developing the skills needed to grow, contribute, and thrive in the information security field.
That is why Mastering Security by Design is offered on a pay-what-you-can basis.
The course is completely free to read and use under the CC BY-SA licence. If you find it valuable and are in a position to do so, we kindly invite you to make a voluntary contribution. Your support helps fund ongoing development, updates, maintenance, and the creation of new learning resources.
If you cannot contribute, please continue learning — you are very welcome here. If you can, your support makes a meaningful difference.
Learning Objectives¶
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
Articulate Security by Design – Define the core philosophy of proactive, embedded security and explain how it differs from reactive, bolt-on approaches.
Apply secure design principles – Implement foundational principles such as least privilege, defence in depth, and fail secure to real-world architectures.
Conduct threat modeling and risk assessment – Identify attack paths, prioritise threats, and make informed risk-based trade-offs early in the design phase.
Integrate security into the SSDLC – Embed threat modeling, secure coding standards, and continuous testing throughout requirements, design, development, and deployment.
Manage supply chain and open source security – Evaluate third-party packages for trustworthiness, monitor for vulnerabilities, and establish rapid alerting and update processes.
Create a security architecture – Create layered, verifiable system architectures that enforce security policies and isolate trust boundaries by design.
Foster security culture and monitoring – Build organisational behaviours that reward secure practice, alongside observable systems that detect anomalies and validate controls continuously.
Topics Overview¶
- Mastering Security By Design
- Introducing Security By Design
- Security Principles
- Threat Modeling
- Security Architecture
- Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC)
- Open Source Security
- Prevention
- Security Monitoring
- Security Policies
- Risk Assessment
- Security Management
- Security Culture
- Security Training
- Help
In the section Introduction more information is given on why these topics are crucial for Mastering Security By Design.
What This Book Is Not¶
This course book, Mastering Security by Design, is intended to guide you through the essential concepts required to apply Security by Design effectively.
This book focuses exclusively on the critical principles and practices you need to understand and apply in order to master Security by Design.
Copyright and License¶
(c) 2021-2026 BM-Support.org - Maikel & Asim and all contributors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Third-party product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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