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 Page 1 09/01/2022 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 Thomas Percival Page 2 09/01/2022
