It is the best of times and the worst of times. We are living in an age when individuals treasure their privacy and lose it a thousand times an hour, every day they turn on their computers. The power of computers and the Internet to produce good is mind-boggling. The digital uses of medical information alone are miraculous. Nevertheless, the paraphrase of Dickens’ opening lines in A tale of two cities is eerily similar to what we are facing now: Perhaps not the guillotine, but certainly the possible death of personal privacy.

The contributing authors to this text are doing everything possible to keep our information private, while the bad guys are working just as hard to make it “un-private.” This wonderfully documented text explores the mechanics and methods of digital security and the steps necessary to ensure privacy.

Part 1 consists of four chapters, which lay the groundwork of terminology and cyber security viewed from the cyber world: the cyber world as a social system; citizens in the cyber world; and rights and privileges as far as the cyber world is concerned--even the rights of those trying to undermine that security.

Part 2 is a compendium of five chapters exploring cyber warfare, deception, and legal ramifications. It concludes with a practical schema of a model of security in Finland.

Part 3 is an in-depth, highly sophisticated mathematical treatment of the technology proposals for models of security. This part discusses the challenges of timing and side channel attacks. Side channel attacks use seemingly innocent, unrelated sources to gain information. For example, tracking the number of times pizza is delivered to an office can indicate the hours programmers are working on cyber software. Timing is a technique hackers use to measure the amount of time necessary for a system to engage. Other methods include the knowledge gained from a network log.

Part 4 details the efforts to develop cyber secure models in a specific country (Australia). It concludes with two chapters on dependable automation and specialized honeypots, that is, decoys designed to thwart any enemy attack for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.

For the professional who is mathematically literate, the book is a must-read. The reference sections that follow each chapter rival that of any PhD thesis ever written. It is magnificent in its scholarship.