Cybersec base#006- CIA Triad and its Measures

Let's take a look at this scenario.

you have a journal/diary where you record your deepest thoughts and feelings. If someone reads it without your consent, you will feel violated and certainly be angry, and will seek measures to secure it(IS THIS CORRECT?). NOW LET US CONNECT THIS TO THE CIA TRIAD

C- Confidentiality- To maintain its privacy, you will put your journal in a locked drawer that only you have the key to.

I-Integrity- To maintain the accuracy of your diary and ensure that no one can delete or alter your writings without your knowledge, you will use a pen that cannot be erased.

A- Availability- You would want your diary to be available to you always, whenever you need to update it. You could make a backup copy of your diary in case your original diary is lost or stolen. This is likely a soft backup copy.

In this post, we will discuss the 3 elements of Cybersecurity, the CIA Triad, along with security measures to ensure each element

Hold on for the ride!!!

From the story above, your journal can be protected so that only you have access to your thoughts and feelings by following the simple steps listed. The same is true for information security; by implementing protections for confidentiality, integrity, and availability, sensitive data and systems can be kept secure and available to ONLY AUTHORISED USERS. Now, let's discuss the CIA in detail.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is a principle that ensures information is kept private and not exposed to unwanted access, disclosure, or usage

Security Measures to Ensure Confidentiality

Encryption: This is the process of converting plain text into a ciphertext that can only be decrypted with the use of a secret key. Encrypting confidential information ensures that even if an unauthorized person has access to it, they cannot read or use it.

Access Control: Access control techniques only permit those people who are authorized to see confidential information to have access to it. This can be via the usage of password restrictions, two-factor authentication systems, and role-based access control(RBAC).

Physical Security: This is the process of ensuring secure access to locations where sensitive information is stored, such as data centers and servers.

Data loss prevention (DLP): DLP solutions can help to track the movement of private data in an organization and ensure data privacy. it will alert and stop the illegal sharing of sensitive data.

Confidentiality policy: These are procedures that employees must follow to protect confidential information.

Secure Communication: is dependent on secure channels like Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and secure messaging platforms to maintain the confidentiality of private information before it is transmitted on the internet.

Data retention policy: This policy will guide employees on what data to keep, for how long, and how to dispose of data that is no longer necessary. This policy helps in reducing the amount of data held by a company, making it easier to protect and manage.

Training and Awareness: Companies might organize training sessions and awareness sessions regularly for the employees to teach them about the protection of sensitive information. Employees will be evaluated after each training session.

Non-Disclosure Agreements(NDA): employees are required to sign it to ensure that those granted access to the data do not reveal it.

Integrity

Integrity ensures that information is trustworthy in the sense that it’s reliable and authentic.

Security Measures to Ensure Integrity

Hashing: this is the process of converting data into a fixed-length string of characters that cannot be changed back to its original form. Integrity can be ensured by comparing the hash value of received data to the hash value of data as it was sent to ascertain whether the data was altered.

Digital Signatures: are used to control the digital documents' authenticity and trace if they have not been edited. Digital signatures are developed by the use of security processes that allow a signer's identity to be authenticated. The signature is a guarantee from the signer that the information was not changed in any way.

Version Control: It is one of the software engineering disciplines that is necessary for the management of different versions of files kept in history. The system keeps a thorough history of changes, makes vital authorization before such changes are introduced, and prevents unintentional changes. A perfect example is Git

Digital Certificates: These are electronic documents that are used to validate the identification of individuals, companies, or devices and to enable secure Internet communication. They contribute to data integrity by generating digital signatures, verifying identities, encrypting data, and depending on trusted third-party certificate authorities

Data Validation Implementation: data validation methods are also put in place so that data is not incomplete or inaccurate, and it has allowed character. E.g., checking data format, length of fields, and checking the range of values is a part of it.

Change management: This is essential to guarantee that changes to data and systems are permitted, recorded, and tested.

Availability

The principle that ensures data and system accessibility to authorized users at all times is called availability or uptime.

Security Measures to Ensure Availability

Redundancy: the need to duplicate the important systems/components to guarantee availability in case there is a failure.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning: Business continuity planning is the ability to continue delivering products or services at predefined acceptable levels following a disruptive incident. Disaster recovery is a set of policies and procedures, along with tools, that recover either the key infrastructure of technology or its systems in the aftermath of a disaster.

Backups: These are copies of important data or system configurations that, if, for any reason, failure or loss occurs, the original data or configurations can be recovered.

Virtualization: This is the technology that makes it possible to run a lot of virtual machines (VMs) in one device. Virtualization effectively manages availability by ensuring the availability of the core applications and services and quickly returning the VM in case of failure, in addition to offering flexible and resilient network virtualization that can be redesigned quickly in the event of a disruption.

Monitoring and Maintenance: This measure helps to identify a potential problem before it grows into a problem that causes a major system downtime. Performance measurements, such as CPU consumption, memory usage, and disk space utilization, may be employed as an assessment that will help to detect a problem and take corrective action in due time. Regular maintenance in the form of improved software versions, security patches for regular updating, and backup copies can help to negate the onset of failures and increase stability of the system.

"Privacy, accuracy, and accessibility are the cornerstones of information management. We need to ensure that we are protecting people's privacy, while also ensuring that information is accurate and accessible to those who need it."

- Ann Cavoukian