Open and Free Security Books#
AI#
AI Exchange: the world’s AI security guide
Covers the fundamentals and represents the closest publicly available alignment of global expert consensus, feeding directly into the AI Act and ISO standards through a unique SDO partnership.
Architecture and Foundational#
Mastering Security By Design
Security by design is a proven method to develop products that are less vulnerable for cyber security threats.This comprehensive guide outlines the crucial elements of this design philosophy.
Security Reference Architecture
Create better and faster security solutions for your security use case. Use proven open solution. This Playbook is created to help you with solving your specific complex security challenges.
Simplify Security Guide
This Playbook is a guide so you can quickly find simple cyber solutions that do work. Reuse of open and proven security solutions saves time and resources and makes our digital world a nicer place. We will show that simple cyber solutions to mitigate nowadays cyber risks are possible. We provide recipes for solutions on common security challenges.
Cryptography#
A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography
The book is intended to be self contained. Some supplementary material covering basic facts fromprobability theory and algebra is provided in the appendices. Indepth book, including a lot of math!
Crypto101
Crypto 101 is an introductory course on cryptography, freely available for programmers of all ages and skill levels. Comes with everything you need to understand complete systems such as SSL/TLS: block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, message authentication codes, public key encryption, key agreement protocols, and signature algorithms.
Practical Cryptography for Developers
A modern practical book about cryptography for developers with code examples, covering core concepts like: hashes (like SHA-3 and BLAKE2), MAC codes (like HMAC and GMAC) and more!
Programming Differential Privacy
This is a book about differential privacy, for programmers. It is intended to give you an introduction to the challenges of data privacy, introduce you to the techniques that have been developed for addressing those challenges, and help you understand how to implement some of those techniques.
The Beginner’s Textbook for Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a cryptographic scheme that enables computations to be performed directly on encrypted data, as if the data were in plaintext. Read this book if you want to learn the math behind it! Found on https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05136
The Joy of Cryptography
The Joy of Cryptography is a free undergraduate-level textbook that introduces students to the fundamentals of provable security.
IoT#
IoT Security Reference Architecture For The Healthcare Industry
This paper addresses the mounting risks associated with the increasing use of IoT products in a health-relatedecosystem, including confidentiality and integrity of devices and data, and availability of communications.
Privacy#
Simplify Digital Privacy
Security and privacy are distinct topics, but they are also closely related. Without digital security, your privacy is at risk! To empower you with solid, open and transparent knowledge we created a digital playbook that is dedicated to Simplify Digital Security.
Risk Management#
Risk Assessment Process
A risk assessment process this is designed to enable agencies to systematically identify, analyse and evaluate the information security risks associated with an information system or service together with the controls required to manage them. Usuable for private and public companies worldwide of course! The PDF is an excellent how-to document.
Secure Coding#
Low-Level Software Security for Compiler Developers
With software security becoming even more important in recent years, it is no surprise to see an ever increasing variety of security hardening features and mitigations against vulnerabilities implemented in compilers. This book aims to help developers of code generation tools such as JITs, compilers, linkers and assemblers to overcome this.
Security Testing#
Mastering Security Testing for Python
This book is designed for developers and security enthusiasts, taking you from basic code hygiene through to advanced security analysis. It focuses on using reliable open-source security tools to identify vulnerabilities arising from Python’s dynamic nature and the common pitfalls in its ecosystem.
Pentester’s Promiscuous Notebook
Software Engineering#
Malware Reverse Engineering Handbook
This handbook by CCDCOE Technology Branch researchers gives an overview of how to analyse malware executables that are targeting the Windows platform.