Keep security simple

This is a principle or a set of principles. To view all principles, please see the Principle Category page.

Summary

Attack surface area and simplicity go hand in hand. Certain software engineering fads prefer overly complex approaches to what would otherwise be relatively straightforward and simple code.

Developers should avoid the use of double negatives and complex architectures when a simpler approach would be faster and simpler.

For example, although it might be fashionable to have a slew of singleton entity beans running on a separate middleware server, it is more secure and faster to simply use global variables with an appropriate mutex mechanism to protect against race conditions.

See How to write insecure code for a tongue-in-cheek discussion of keeping security simple.