1.1 Understand and apply concepts of confidentiality, integrity and availability

1.1 Understand and apply concepts of confidentiality, integrity and availability

The primary goals and objectives of security are contained within the CIA Triad which is the name given to the three primary security principles :

1. Confidentiality
2. Integrity
3. Availability.

 

These three principles are considered the most important to evaluate all the things related to security.

Confidentiality:  

It offers a high level of assurance that data, object or resources are restricted from unauthorized subjects.

Following attacks focus on the violation of confidentiality.

• Capturing network traffic and stealing password files as well as social engineering, port scanning, shoulder surfing, eavesdropping, sniffing and so on.
• Confidentiality violations can result from the actions of an end user or a system administrator. 
• They can occur because of an oversight in security policy or a misconfigured security control. 

Countermeasures for Confidentiality:

• Encryption
• Padding network traffic
• Strict access control
• Rigorous authentication procedures,
• Data classification and 
• Extensive personnel training.

Confidentiality includes the following:

• Sensitivity: Maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive information helps to prevent harm or damage.
• Discretion: It is an act of decision where the operator can control disclosure to minimize the harm.
• Criticality: The higher the level of criticality needs to maintain the confidentiality of the information.
• Concealment: It is an act of hiding or preventing disclosure.
• Secrecy: The act of keeping something secret or preventing the disclosure of information.
• Privacy: Keeping personally identifiable information confidential that might cause harm, embarrassment, or disgrace to someone if revealed.
• Seclusion: Storing something in an out-of-the-way location and provide strict access controls to enforce confidentiality.
• Isolation: The act of keeping something separated from others to information disclosure.

Integrity:

Maintaining the consistency, accuracy, and trustworthiness of data over its entire life cycle . 

Data must not be changed in transit, and steps must be taken to ensure that data cannot be altered by unauthorized people. 

Integrity can be examined from three perspectives:

• Preventing unauthorized subjects from making modifications.
• Preventing authorized subjects from making unauthorized modifications, such as mistakes.
• Maintaining the internal and external consistency of objects so that their data is a correct and true reflection of the real world. 

Integrity to be maintained with the following action:

• Controls must be in places to restrict access to data, objects, and resources,
• Activity logging should be employed to ensure that only authorized users are able to access their respective resources.
• Major should be taken to avoid Viruses, logic bombs attacks which focus on the violation of integrity,
• Avoiding unauthorized access errors in coding and applications, malicious modification, intentional replacement and system back doors.

Countermeasures to ensure integrity against possible threats. 

• Strict access control,
• Rigorous authentication procedures, 
• Intrusion detection systems,
• object/data encryption
• hashing verification of data
• Interface restriction,
• Input/function checks and
• extensive personnel training. 

Integrity depends on confidentiality, without confidentiality, integrity cannot be maintained. 

Integrity includes accuracy, truthfulness, authenticity, validity, nonrepudiation, accountability, responsibility, completeness, and comprehensiveness.

Availability:

The authorized subjects are granted timely and uninterrupted access to objects. 

If a security mechanism offers availability, it offers a high level of assurance that the data objects and resources are accessible to authorized subjects. 

Availability ensures

• Preventing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks,
• Infrastructure is functional and allows authorized user to gain authorized access.

The events that lead to availability breaches include

• Accidentally deleting files, 
• Overutilizing a hardware or software component, 
• Underallocating resources
• Mislabeling or incorrectly classifying objects.
• Any user or Administrator oversight in security policy or misconfigured security control. 

Countermeasures to ensure availability against possible threats. 

• Designing intermediary delivery systems properly, 
• Using access controls effectively,
• monitoring performance and network traffic
• Using firewalls and routers to prevent DoS attacks,
• Implementing redundancy for critical systems, 
• Focus on the use of fault tolerance features at the various levels of access/storage/security.

Without integrity and confidentiality availability cannot be maintained. 

The other concepts, conditions, and aspects of availability include usability, accessibility, and timelines.