The CIA security triad model is built around the principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information, which are critical to the business’s operation, and the CIA triad divides these three concepts into individual focal points. This distinction is advantageous because it allows security teams to identify various approaches to each problem. When all three benchmarks are met, the organization’s security posture becomes more assertive and better prepared to handle threat incidents.
The CIA refers to the CIA triad, a vision that focuses on the balance of data confidentiality, integrity, and availability under the protection of your information security structure. The triad’s goal is to assist institutions in developing their security strategy, policies, and controls, while also serving as a foundational starting point for any unknown use cases, products, and technologies.
Components of the CIA Triad
1. Confidentiality
Confidentiality in information security ensures that only authorized individuals have access to information. It refers to an organization’s actions to keep data confidential or private. Simply put, it is about retaining access to data in order to prevent unauthorized disclosure.
To accomplish this, information access must be supervised and controlled to prevent unauthorized data access, whether intentional or unintentional. A critical component of maintaining confidentiality is ensuring that people without proper authorization are barred from accessing assets critical to your business.
2. Integrity
This refers to the state of being unaltered or complete. Integrity in information security refers to ensuring that data has not been tampered with and can be trusted.
This contributes to data trustworthiness by keeping it in the correct form and immune to any inappropriate mutation. It lays the groundwork for your assets and necessitates institutions ensuring uniform, precise, trustworthy, and secure data. If the data is inaccurate or tampered with, it could indicate a cyber-attack, vulnerability, or security incident.
3. Availability
Systems, applications, and data are worthless to an organization and its customers if they are not accessible when authorized users need them. Availability simply means that networks, systems, and applications are up and running. It ensures that authorized users have timely and dependable access to resources when needed.
Availability can be jeopardized by a variety of factors, including hardware or software failure, power outage, natural disasters beyond one’s control, and human error. The denial-of-service (DoS) or DDoS attack, in which the performance of a server, system, web app, or web-based service is knowingly and maliciously harmed, or the system becomes completely inaccessible, is perhaps the most well-known attack that jeopardizes availability.