Profile
Michael Ye
Security Architect and engineer with more than 15 years of experience across financial services, life sciences, healthcare, and aviation. My work focuses on secure architecture, threat modelling, and practical controls for applications, cloud, and infrastructure. I am currently pursuing an MSc in Cybersecurity with the University of London, under the academic direction of Royal Holloway. I write here under the pen name Solly.
Outside work, I am a husband and father of two and I really enjoy spending time with my family.
My hobbies revolve around lifelong learning. I'm fascinated by complex systems, particularly astrophysics, psychology, artificial intelligence, computer science, and cybersecurity. I enjoy understanding the principles that explain how the world, technology, and people work.
The following are the my personal top ten principles that i often think about and would like to share with everyone.
Design security in from the start
Integrate security from the start. Retrofitting security onto a completed architecture is difficult, brittle, and expensive.
Know your threat model
Identify who your attacker is and what resources they possess. Design defenses around realistic capabilities rather than assuming trust.
Security is economics
No system is completely secure. The cost of defense must be proportional to the value of the asset and the cost of the attack.
Security through obscurity fallacy
Design under the assumption that the attacker knows all internal details of the system. Never rely on security through obscurity.
Use fail-safe defaults
Choose defaults that deny access. If a security mechanism fails or crashes, it must default to a secure state (fail-closed).
Least privilege
Every process and user should operate with the minimum privileges necessary, limiting the blast radius of any compromise.
Separation of responsibility
Split up privileges so no single party holds absolute power. Require collusion or multiple approvals for critical actions.
Defense in depth
Layer multiple independent defensive controls. An attacker must breach every layer, not just one, to compromise the system.
Detect if you can't prevent
If prevention fails, ensure you can detect the breach. Detection without response is pointless, so plan for recovery.
Consider Human Factors
Security systems must remain usable. If a control is too inconvenient, users will subvert it to make their lives easier.