CIA Triad

CIA triad is an information security model which helps organizations to set certain rules, regulations, and policies to protect the organization from unauthorized access and data exfiltration. The principles which form the core of the CIA are:

C stands for Confidentiality

I  for Integrity

A  for Availability

Confidentiality: It aims to protect sensitive information from being accessed by unauthorized individuals or systems when it is being transferred via a network or as such. One way to do this is to use encryption techniques so that even if the data gets corrupted it cannot be decrypted. Encryption standards include 

AES: Advanced Encryption Standard

DES: Data Encryption Standard

Data is commonly categorized based on the amount and type of damage that can be caused to it if it fell into wrong hands. Appropriate measures are then implemented according to the categories. 

Integrity: It involves making sure that the data does not change in transit. It should not be modified while data is being sent over the network may be between two systems. The way to ensure this is the use of hash functions. Two commonly used hash functions are

MD5 (Message Direct 5)

SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm)

What a hash function does is when data is sent from one system to another it reads the data and attaches an arbitrary hash value H1 to the data. When the data is received at the other end the hash function again reads the data and attached another hash value H2 to it. If H1=H2, then the integrity of the data has been maintained. 

Availability: This ensures that data is readily available to authorized users as and when required. This should not take an ample amount of time and the system or network should be designed in such a way that in case of any attack or natural calamity as well the information is available through other systems if the primary system has been affected.