Our daily life and the objects that surround us are becoming more and more intertwined in networks of computers and algorithms, in a manner so pervasive that often we fail to appreciate how much we depend on them and to what extent we end up becoming an integral part of the overall attack surface.

Real-life objects blend with digital technologies to create cyber-physical systems spanning several dimensions, from transportation systems, like cars and planes, to smart grids and robotic systems, with excursions into body trackers and medical devices.

The benefits are indisputable, and cyber-physical systems have a definite potential to make our lives better and more secure. At the same time, as adoption becomes widespread, alarms emerge on related risks, where faults in safety-critical systems can result in serious consequences. From that perspective, cyber-attacks are becoming a concern, as attackers have started an aggressive campaign of exploration and exploitation of vulnerabilities, for publicity, profit, and malevolence.

Chung-Wei Lin and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli set the record straight starting from the first page of their book: they state that adding security mechanisms after the design of a cyber-physical system has been completed is very difficult, and sometimes impossible. The so-called V-model, in which architecture, design, implementation, integration, and operations are defined without consideration for security requirements, needs to evolve into a systematic approach, where security is considered from the early stages, together with all other design constraints.

This is what their book is about: providing examples of a structured methodology for security-aware design, combining mathematical abstractions with system-specific examples, offering a roadmap for adoption that is realistically rooted in current widespread implementations of cyber-physical systems.

On the practical side, this tiny yet dense publication presents the security mechanisms for the controller area network (CAN) protocol, the most used serial protocol for in-vehicle networked architectures, to protect against masquerade and replay attacks. The discussion extends to cover security-aware design for time-division multiple access (TDMA) real-time distributed systems, which present different constraints than CAN-based systems. The important role of key management strategies in providing greater security with a balanced overhead is also explained. A final section covers security-aware design for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications with the dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) technology. Key decisions are presented on the arbitration of sending rates and authentication rates, both playing dominant roles in systems performance, for safety and security.

The authors have produced an interesting book, supplemented by a very rich bibliographic section, which serves as a source for reference and increased awareness to the practitioner community.