What is the difference between Physical Security and Logical Security in information security?

Physical Security

Physical security is represented as the security of personnel, hardware, programs, networks, and data from physical situations and events that can support severe losses or harm to an enterprise, departments, or organization. This contains security from fire, natural disasters, robbery, theft, elimination, and terrorism.

Physical security is an essential part of a security plan. It forms the basis for some security efforts, such as data security. Physical security defines the protection of building sites and equipment (some data and software contained therein) from theft, vandalism, natural disaster, man-made catastrophes, and accidental damage (e.g., from electrical surges, extreme temperatures, and spilled coffee).

It needed hard building construction, suitable emergency mobility, stable power provision, adequate climate control, and appropriate protection from intruders. Risk assessment process recognizes the organization’s vulnerabilities. It can use the vulnerabilities record to set priorities on resources needed. Each improvement of an identified vulnerability in the current system will usually provide more security than previously. It can improve the system to the extent possible, and maintain a list of improvements still needed.

Physical threat to a computer system can be as a result of loss of the entire computer system, damage of hardware, damage to the computer software, theft of the computer system, vandalism, natural disaster including flood, fire, war, earthquakes etc. Acts of terrorism including the attack on the world trade centre is also one of the major threats to computer which can be defined as physical threat.

Logical Security

Logical security defines the process of using software-based techniques for authenticating a user's privileges on a definite computer network or system. The concept is an element of the more complete area of computer security, which includes both hardware and software methods for acquiring a terminal or network. In logical security, it involves usernames and passwords, token security, and two-way authentication on a system.

Password authentication is the most common and well-known type of logical security. Anyone who has ever used an online banking site or a social networking system will be well-known with this concept. When a network has been set up to use password authentication, users attempting to log in to a definite terminal on the network are first forced to prove their credentials by inputting a username and password.

The benefit of logical security is simplicity. Users require nothing more than their memorized username and password information to access the system. One major drawback is that the computer has no way to test whether the individual using a specific username and password combination is the authorized user; unscrupulous users can steal usernames and passwords to damage the system.