Security Audit
A systematic evaluation of a system's security posture against standards and best practices. Covers access controls, encryption, logging, vulnerability management, and compliance.
What is Security Audit?
A systematic evaluation of a system's security posture against standards and best practices. Covers access controls, encryption, logging, vulnerability management, and compliance.
Security Audit is a advanced concept that sits in the Security Testing & Operations area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Security Audit" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
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See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Penetration Testing
Authorized simulated attacks against a system to find security vulnerabilities before real attackers do. White-hat hackers probe for weaknesses in a controlled environment.
Threat Modeling
A structured process for identifying security threats, attack surfaces, and mitigations during system design. STRIDE and DREAD are common frameworks.
GDPR
General Data Protection Regulation: EU law governing how personal data is collected, stored, and processed. Requires consent, data portability, and the right to be forgotten.