Security engineering is about creating viable solutions to real-world security problems-solutions that would address the requirements, be cost-effective, competitive, and yet be subject to the limitations of today security and software technologies. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the ongoing research towards improving the state of security engineering that together with my colleagues I conduct at the University of British Columbia. Specifically, I will focus on the following: * comparative study of the approaches to security mechanisms engineering * policy decision models & architecture(s) for massive scale enterprises * composable policy engines * improving usability of security administration * towards security agile assurance * end-to-end selective data protection with partially-trusted proxies