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What is CIA Triad in Information Security?
The CIA Triad is a concept in information security. It guides an organization's data security operations. The 3 letters in CIA stand for confidentiality, integrity, and availability. They are the three pillars of a security architecture. In fact, applying these concepts to any security program is optimal.
When working as a triad, the three notions are in conflict with one another. Extensive authentication, for example, helps preserve secrecy and lowers availability since certain persons who have the right to the data may not be able to access it.
The three terms are explained below.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality refers to the steps made by an organization to keep its data private or hidden. In practice, this involves limiting data access to prevent unauthorized disclosure. This requires ensuring that only authorized people have access to specified assets and that unauthorized individuals are actively discouraged from gaining access.
Direct assaults aiming to acquire unauthorized access to systems, applications, and databases to steal or tamper with data are examples of how confidentiality can be compromised.
Other examples include network surveillance and various sorts of scanning, electronic eavesdropping (through a man-in-the-middle attack), and an attacker escalating system privileges. Confidentiality might be breached accidentally as a result of human mistakes or negligence too. For example, failure to adequately protect passwords (by users or IT security), failure to encrypt data (in process, transit, and storage); physical eavesdropping (also known as shoulder surfing), weak authentication methods, etc.
To protect confidentiality, countermeasures include data classification and labeling, strong access controls and authentication mechanisms, data encryption in process, transit, and storage, steganography, remote wipe capabilities, and adequate education and training for all individuals with access to data.
Integrity
Integrity refers to the assurance that data has not been tampered with and can thus be trusted. Integrity contributes to the dependability of data by ensuring that it is in the correct condition and free of any unauthorized changes.
Example − Customers who shop online demand precise product and price information, as well as the assurance that quantity, pricing, availability, and other details will not change after they make an order. Financial consumers must have confidence in the security of their banking information and account balances. Protecting data in use is essential. Integrity can be harmed purposefully by interfering with intrusion detection systems, manipulating configuration files, changing system logs to dodge detection, or accidentally by human mistake, carelessness, coding flaws, or insufficient policies, processes, and protective measures.
Encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and digital certificates are data integrity countermeasures. Integrity is also linked to the notion of non-repudiation, which says that one cannot refute the truthfulness of particular acts. For instance, if an email with a digital signature is sent or received, the integrity of these types of online transactions will be preserved.
Availability
Networks, systems, and available applications are functioning. It ensures that authorized users get consistent and timely access to resources when they are needed. Systems, programs, and data are of little utility to a business and its customers if they are not available when authorized users require them.
While hardware or software failure, power outages, natural catastrophes, and human mistake are all potential threats to availability, the 'denial-of-service' attack, in which the performance of a system, website, or web-based application is purposely and maliciously degraded, or the system becomes unavailable, is perhaps the most well-known assault that threatens availability.
Server, network, application, and service redundancy, regular software patching, hardware fault tolerance (for servers and storage) and system upgrades, comprehensive disaster recovery plans, backups and denial-of-service protection solutions are just some of the countermeasures that can help ensure availability.
Importance of CIA Triad
In some ways, the CIA Triad aids in making sense of the many security tactics, software, and services available. It helps in drawing a clear picture of what is necessary to overcome the security problems.
The CIA Triad assists in making more effective judgments about which of the three principles is most beneficial for the unique collection of data and for the business when creating an information security policy.
The CIA triad serves as the cornerstone for developing security systems and policies for businesses. As a result, the CIA triad is critical in keeping your data safe and secure in the face of rising cyber threats.
When a security event happens such as data theft or a security breach, it is determined that an organization failed to apply one or more of these principles properly. The CIA triad is crucial to information security because it improves security posture, aids compliance with complicated requirements, and assures business continuity.
When a corporation is developing a security program, the CIA Triad can be used as a yardstick to justify the necessity for the security controls being evaluated. All security measures inevitably return to one or more of the three guiding principles.
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