Design 17: Computer Security

Theme

Computer security is a topic that I have some practical experience with through auth tokens, authorization, encryption, and hashing. Exposure to these concepts is a relatively common experience in backend development. Ultimately, I have working knowledge of some of these topics with much of the underlying complexity abstracted away.

This puzzle is more of a high-level overview of computer security rather than a deep dive into any particular area. A more specialized puzzle would likely focus on a subfield such as cryptography, access management, network security, or application security. Perhaps that can happen in a future puzzle.

Grid

Grid construction was relatively straightforward. A lot of the answers were relatively long, but there were also several short ones. I didn’t feel too constrained by space when figuring out different placements. Most answers also contained common characters. I only needed to watch out for Authentication (14) and Authorization (13) since both were quite long.

I added Token as an additional clue to provide more fill to the board since it looked visually sparse due to the number of long answers and low intersections. I thought of adding more clues, but I couldn’t think of any strong additions that fit the existing theme.

Clues

Clue writing took some iteration. Even though the clues were standard computer security concepts, I had to make sure they were clear without sounding too much like textbook definitions. I also had to ensure similar concepts had distinct clues. For example, Authentication and Authorization can easily become too similar. The same applies to Hashing and Encryption.

Finally, I added additional detail to make some of the clues more interesting. This included additional context and examples where appropriate.

Tradeoffs

A lot of the answers were high-level concepts and not too specialized. This puzzle is more of a practical broad overview of computer security from a backend engineer’s perspective. I would have liked to include more specialized clues involving different hashing algorithms, but I didn’t want cryptography to be overrepresented in the puzzle. Instead, I tried to include concepts from different parts of the field including access control, cryptography, and network security.

Notes

I didn’t know HTTPS relied on third-party certificate authorities before researching this puzzle. I think adding this detail to the Authentication clue made it much more interesting. Computer Architecture will be the next puzzle!