# Characteristics of Security Architecture

**Characteristics of Security Architecture**

* **Importance of Architecture**:
  * Forms the foundation of good security.
  * How security is constructed is as important as the controls used.
* **Analogy**:
  * **Winchester Mystery House**: A poorly constructed house without blueprints or systematic design.
  * **Lesson**: Without a clear architecture, complex systems can become disorganized and ineffective.
* **Raspberry Pi Incident at Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL)**:
  * **Incident**: Unauthorized Raspberry Pi connected to the internal network allowed hackers to extract 500MB of data.
  * **Shortcomings**: Lack of detection mechanisms for unauthorized devices and insufficient network segmentation.
  * **Lesson**: Systematic threat analysis and control design could have prevented the breach.

**Complexity and Security Architecture**

* **Shed vs. House vs. High-Rise Building**:
  * **Shed**: Simple, can be planned and constructed by one person with minimal tools.
  * **House**: Requires a team of skilled professionals, an architect, and a project manager.
  * **High-Rise Building**: Involves many teams, diverse techniques, and detailed architectural plans at multiple levels of abstraction.
* **Architectural Plans**:
  * **High-Level Architecture**: Shows the overall solution without specific details.
  * **Decomposition**: The architecture is broken down into designs for buildings, floors, and individual apartments.
  * **Patterns**: Defined to reuse designs for similar components, speeding up development.
* **IT Architecture**:
  * Uses different levels of abstraction targeted at various team members (e.g., storage, platform, security).
  * **Security Viewpoint**: An essential aspect that identifies security capabilities within the system.
  * **Systematic Communication**: Ensures that all team members construct a robust and integrated system.

**Architectural Thinking**

* **Objective**: Create and communicate a good structure and behavior to avoid chaos.
* **Levels of Abstraction**: Covering both implementation and operations, requiring a balance between security, usability, resilience, and cost.
* **Static Structure**: Describes how components are connected.
* **Dynamic Behavior**: Describes how components interact over time, including secure communication.
* **Design Decisions**: Shape the system, balancing security with other system characteristics.
