One of the Core Principals in Cybersecurity
The CIA Triad is a fundamental concept in information security and cybersecurity. It represents three core principles that are essential for safeguarding the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and information within an organization.
The CIA Triad stands for:
Confidentiality: This principle focuses on protecting information from unauthorized access. It ensures that sensitive data is only accessible to those who have the necessary permissions and should be kept confidential.
Integrity: Integrity refers to the accuracy and trustworthiness of data. It ensures that data is not tampered with or altered by unauthorized individuals or processes.
Availability: Availability ensures that data and information are accessible when needed. This means that systems and data should be available for authorized users and processes, and downtime should be minimized.
These three principles are often depicted as the vertices of a triangle, with the understanding that they are interrelated and must be balanced. Making a change to enhance one aspect of the CIA Triad (e.g., increasing confidentiality through strong encryption) may have implications for the other aspects (e.g., potentially impacting availability or ease of access). A well-rounded information security strategy aims to find the right balance between these three core principles to protect an organization’s data and systems.
CIA Triad on the Front End
So how are our DevSecOps warfighters using the CIA Triad daily to remain secure for the United States? First starting with Confidentiality, some of the practices used by our warfighters are Data Encryption, so implementing strong encryption mechanisms to protect sensitive data, both at rest and in transit. Access Control, which involves using authentication and authorization mechanisms to ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive information. Last but definitely not least, Data Classification, identifying and classifying different types of data, to ensure that access is restricted based on their sensitivity levels.
Next moving on to Integrity, some measures used are Data Validation, implementing input validation, and output encoding to prevent data tampering or injection attacks. Also, Checksums and Hashing use of checksums or cryptographic hashing to verify the integrity of data during transmission or storage. And Change Control, implementing version control and change management processes to ensure that system changes are tracked and verified.
Finally, moving onto Availability, the use of resources such as Redundancy which consists of designing the product with redundancy to minimize downtime in case of hardware or software failures. Also, Load Balancing helps distribute traffic evenly and prevents system overload. Lastly, Disaster Recovery and Backup createing backup and disaster recovery plans to ensure data and service availability in case of unexpected incidents.
It is important to incorporate the CIA Triad because it is particularly helpful when developing systems around data classification and managing permissions and access privileges. It is also useful for managing the products and data of research. This is why the CIA triad is one of many core concepts in cybersecurity.
