CIA Triad Definition

What is the CIA Triad?

The CIA triad stands for confidentiality, integrity, and availability and is a fundamental concept in information security. Ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive data is one of the primary purposes of cybersecurity programs.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality means that sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access. Only those who are meant to access the information can access it.

Various tools exist to ensure data confidentiality, including:

• Encryption: Encryption algorithms render data impossible to read without access to the correct decryption key. Access to the data is managed by controlling access to that key.
• Access Controls: Access controls can be used to prevent unauthorized users from accessing data. For example, files on a computer can be set to only allow certain users to read them.

Integrity

Integrity ensures that data remains unchanged and uncorrupted. Any modifications or alterations to them by unauthorized users are detectable.

Some methods for ensuring data integrity include:

• Hash Functions: Hash functions are cryptographic algorithms that take any input and produce a fixed-size output. Finding a collision — two inputs that produce the same hash — is infeasible for secure hash algorithms. If a file hash is stored in a secure place, any changes to that file are detectable because they would cause the hash of the file to no longer match the stored value.
• Digital Signatures: Digital signatures involve encrypting the hash of a data with a user’s private key and can be verified using the corresponding public key. They help to protect data integrity because any change to the data would change the hash, and a digital signature for the new hash can only be generated by someone who knows the right private key.
• Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC): CRC is an algorithm used to identify accidental modifications to data. Anyone can generate a CRC code, so it’s not a protection against malicious modifications, but it can be used to detect disk or transmission errors.

Availability

Availability means that legitimate users can access data or systems when they need them. It can be impacted both by intentional attacks and natural events such as a power outage or a failure to allocate enough processing power to meet demand.

Organizations can use various methods to ensure the availability of data and other resources, including:

• Redundancy: Redundancy refers to having more than one of a resource, ensuring that a single system failing won’t bring down a service. Ideally, these systems are geographically distributed so that a single occurrence — such as a localized power outage — wouldn’t affect all of them.
• Load Balancing: Load balancing distributes requests or load across multiple redundant systems. This ensures that if one system is overloaded or fails the other systems can pick up the slack with minimal impact on users.

Conclusion

The CIA triad is one of the defining principles of cybersecurity. By putting solutions and policies in place to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data, an organization has implemented protections against most cyber threats and natural disasters that it could face.