The importance of CIA: confidentiality, integrity and availability

In network security, there are 3 fundamental concepts called accessibility, confidentiality, and integrity. If any of the 3 is not present, the other 2 can’t be either achieved.

Taken from https://www.checkmarx.com/2016/06/24/20160624the-importance-of-database-security-and-integrity/

Availability

We need to make sure that all our systems and networks stay up and running properly 24/7. This term involves everything related to capacity, performance, and software/hardware failure.

We must be prepared to prevent any data loss with regular backups stored in more than one place, we need trained people capable of restoring the information in a fast and secure way, our system infrastructure must be redundant so in case we have any hardware, software or power supply failure we can prevent any service interruption.

Availability also involves the correct firewall and infrastructure setup in our network to prevent any kind of network stress attack, which is a very common threat now. DDoS attacks are probably the best example of existing stress attacks on the Internet that can easily affect our network if we don’t have the right setup to mitigate it. Many data centers already offer to their client’s in-house protection, but the best way to protect by not depending on any third-party is having our firewall with the correct rules closing any incoming traffic not necessary and of course, hiding our server public IP using CloudFlare.

Integrity

All the information shared and sent between our systems and network can’t be modified or taken without our permission.

Hackers are a threat and the best way to prevent them is being prepared. We need to control the access to our information with securely hashed passwords, activation of access logs to analyze weird traffic, system firewalls and restricting the access giving least privileges to users and database access.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality means protecting the information to prevent unauthorized access for disclosure or access to it by any individual or system.

In nowadays, online confidentiality is more compromised than ever. Security experts job in companies are having a huge demand simply because the Internet is growing exponentially and therefore, online threats too.

We can see hackers treating big companies about releasing private information such as movies and executive documents, we can see many websites like WikiLeaks publishing confidential information about governments anonymously and I could end up with many examples of how confidentiality can be a nightmare if we don’t take it seriously.This is why as a Software Engineer, we need to prevent this starting with our network, then our system and finally, under our application. Data encryption is a must today. We need to hide sensitive information in a way the intruders can’t decode it.

As a Software Engineer, we have the obligation to implement safety measures starting at the network level, then at the system level and finally, under the final application or service. One way to do this is by using data encryption, which is a must today. We need to hide sensitive information in a way the intruders can’t decode it.

Conclusion

We need to make sure availability, confidentiality and integrity work together to keep our network, systems, and applications secure.

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