INFORMATION SECURITY
CW1
Thomas Percival
THE CIA TRIANGLE
One of the core principles of within information security for data and services is the CIA triangle. This
stands for Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Confidentiality is the assurance that data is as
secure as it needs to be for example a person’s private information needs to be protected from
unauthorised access. There are many ways to violate confidentiality and possible attacks are a real
threat. An example of this would be an unauthorised hacker intercepting information in transit, as the
data has now been seen by someone authorised the confidentiality of it has been lost. The main way
of preventing this is via encryption to ensure than any data intercepted cannot be read without the
correct key. (Walkowski, What Is the CIA Triad?, 2019)
Integrity refers to the accuracy of information. It’s important that information isn’t modified in
retrieval, transit or storage. An of the importance of integrity is in banking. A customer of a bank need
the reassurance than none of their information such as balance hasn’t been tampered with. Not all
breaches of CIA are malicious. An example of this would be human error in the form of someone
entering data wrong. Data can also sometimes be modified this can be remediated via hashing and
checksums. (Fruhlinger, 2020 )
Availability refers to the accessibility of data and is simply about the uptime of a network, server or
application. Ensuring that data is accessible when required. Availability can be affected by many
different factors. There are attacks which are designed to prevent data from being accessed for
example DOS attacks which flood servers with information causing them to crash. If a server is
physically damaged through natural disasters or fires it will also impact availability. To ensure data is
available in the even that a server goes down it is important to have redundancies in place such as
backups and denial of service prevention services.
SECURITY MECHANISMS
Within a digitality networked environment there is a multi-layered mechanism to ensure security is
maintained within a network. The first of these layers is Encipherment which is the obfuscation of
data to ensure its confidentiality and is done by encrypting the data to the point where it is
unreadable, The data is then deciphered on the other end using the decryption key. The next layer is
Access control which is the prevention of access of data unless authorised to do so and is done using
methods such as passwords and firewalls as well as by limiting permissions of certain users within a
network. The third layer is Data integrity which means to ensure that data is kept accurate within a
network. This is done by ensuring that it’s cannot be accessed without authorisation and through
hashing to ensure than data isn’t changed in anyway unintentionally or without knowledge. There is
also authentication exchange which is the mechanism which ensures identify whether data is being
properly exchanged and is achieved through TCP (IBM, 2021) (Darmawan, 2009)
Thomas Percival
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REFERNCES
IBM. (2021). Security concepts and mechanisms. IBM.
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSFKSJ_7.5.0/com.ibm.mq.s
ec.doc/q009730_.htm
Fruhlinger, J. (n.d.). The CIA triad: Definition, components and examples.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3519908/the-cia-triad-definition-componentsand-examples.html
Walkowski, D. (2019). What Is the CIA Triad?
https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/education/what-is-the-cia-triad#:~:text=These
three letters stand for,objectives for every security program.
Darmawan, N. (2009). Security Mechanism in Computer Network Environment: A
Study of Adoption Status in Malaysian Company.
https://scialert.net/fulltext/?doi=jas.2009.2735.2743
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