security objectives of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Confidentiality
According to ISACA is preserving authorized restrictions on access and disclosure Including means for protecting privacy and proprietary information. In other words, we want to keep valuable data and it should only be available to those who need to know about or use it. An example of a threat to confidentiality is the following. You want to download some data off the Internet but on your network, a malicious system sits between you and the network gateway. Then, when you go and download that data, the data is not encrypted and the malicious system snoops on the data before it gets to your system.
here are ways to meet our objective of confidentiality. One way is to encrypt data as it flows from one system to another. In other words, encryption in transit but that's not enough if we want to be able to encrypt data where it's going to be stored. In other words, encryption at rest. We also want to, for example, use access control lists to allow only certain users access, to certain types of data.
- Scenario: Sharing documents on Google Drive with specific access rights.
- Confidentiality Aspect: By double-checking who the documents are shared with and ensuring appropriate access rights (view, edit, or suggest), you are implementing measures to maintain confidentiality.
Achieving confidentiality involves implementing various measures to protect data from unauthorized access, disclosure, or theft.
. Here are some strategies to achieve confidentiality:
Data Classification: Classify your data based on its sensitivity. Categorize data into different levels such as "public," "confidential," and "top secret." This helps you prioritize security measures based on the sensitivity of the data.
Access Controls: Implement access controls to restrict data access to authorized users only. This includes using strong authentication methods, enforcing least privilege principles (users have access only to what they need), and implementing role-based access controls (RBAC).
Encryption: Encrypt sensitive data to render it unreadable without the appropriate decryption key. This includes data at rest, in transit, and during processing. Use strong encryption algorithms and secure key management practices.
Secure Communication Channels: Use secure communication protocols such as HTTPS, SSL/TLS, and VPNs to protect data while it's in transit over networks.
Incident Response: Develop an incident response plan to handle security breaches or incidents involving unauthorized access to sensitive data. Define steps to contain and mitigate the impact of the breach.
Integrity :
Data integrity according to ISACA is the property that data meet with an expectation of quality and that the data can be relied on. In other words, we want to make sure that data and system resources are consistent and accurate.
Maintaining data integrity means that information remains accurate and unaltered throughout its lifecycle, and systems are protected from unauthorized modifications or tampering.
You want to download some data off of the internet but on your network, a malicious system sits between you and the network gateway. Then, when you go and download that data, your system doesn't perform any integrity checks during the download and the malicious system tampers with the data before it reaches your system.
Regularly back up data and systems to restore them in case of data corruption or tampering. Verify the integrity of backups and ensure they are securely stored.
Control who has the permission to modify or access data. Implement strong authentication, least privilege, and role-based access controls to prevent unauthorized modifications
Follow secure coding practices to prevent vulnerabilities that could be exploited to alter data. This includes input validation, escaping user inputs, and using prepared statements.
Availability
Availability ensures that information and resources are accessible and usable by authorized individuals when needed. This principle aims to prevent disruptions, downtime, and outages that could impact the availability of systems, data, and services
we want users of system resources or data to be able to access them in a reliable and timely manner. An example of the threat to availability is a DDoS attack. In other words, a DDoS vulnerability exists, that is then attacked. For example, you host your web application on a system that has limited resources and you connect it to the internet. Then, a flood of requests come at a short time interval and your system no longer has the ability to keep up with serving those requests.
Consider an e-commerce website that experiences a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. In this scenario:
- Threat: Attackers flood the website's servers with a massive volume of malicious traffic, overwhelming the system's capacity to handle legitimate user requests.
- Impact on Availability: As a result of the DDoS attack, the website becomes unavailable to legitimate users. They are unable to access the website, browse products, make purchases, or perform any transactions.
- Mitigation: To mitigate the availability impact of DDoS attacks, the organization could implement a combination of measures such as deploying a web application firewall (WAF), utilizing content delivery networks (CDNs) for load balancing, and employing rate limiting to filter out malicious traffic.