The Cyber Security Fundamentals
We know the security needed to prevent the exploitation of vulnerability in a cyber space is know as Cyber Security. In this article we will talk about all the principles and mechanisms that ensures this security.
Security Principles
CIA Triad
This is one of the most important topic when it comes to principles of security. To maintain Information Security we require three things, Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability, these three things together make up the CIA Triad.
Now lets see what these three terms mean individually.
Confidentiality: There should be an access grant to a particular message only to the sender and receiver. No third person should e able to access the message.
Integrity: It means, correctness of data. In other words what ever data is sent from sender’s end, the same data should reach the receiver.
Availability: The data should be available to the user as per the SLA[Service Level Agreement].For Example: Suppose there is 10GB space available in my mail service, and a hacker sends a lot of spam mails to fill my 10GB quota, this is a simple example of breach in availability.
How to ensure CIA?
There are many ways to maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data. We can use different encryption procedure to convert the plain text into cipher text, this process is also known as cryptography. There is also a process known as hashing that ensures the integrity of the encrypted cipher data. The security can be further increased by enveloping the data and the hash function together.
AAA Triad
It stands for Authentication Authorization and Accountability.
Authentication: It means that a credential is required to verify the legitimacy of a user trying to access a certain data or system.
Authorization: It means giving authority to a particular role or privilege upon successfully authenticating a particular user.
Accountability: Every access given to an authorized user should be accounted for in the system, this is crucial to maintain the integrity of the system.
Security Mechanism
Security mechanisms are technical tools and techniques that are used to implement security services. A mechanism might operate by itself, or with others, to provide a particular service. Security Mechanisms (x.800) has two types:
Specific Security Mechanism
Encipherment: The end to end encryption of data to maintain confidentiality to the users.
Digital Signature: It is kind of a mathematical module used to verify the authenticity of a message.
Access Control: To control the access given to particular user based on their roles.
Data Integrity: Maintaining the Integrity of data throughout the transmission of messages from one user to another by different techniques such as Hash function.
Authentication Exchange: To authenticate the users identity while exchanging the data between them.
Traffic Padding: Padding the data with extra bits to ensure the security of the data while in network traffic
Routing Control: Routing control means selecting and continuously changing different available routes between sender and receiver to prevent the opponent from eavesdropping on a particular route.
Notarization: Using a trusted third party as a proof between users while communication of data.
Passive Security Mechanism
Trusted Functionality: Any functionality that directly provides, or provides access to, security mechanisms should be trustworthy.
Security Label: It is a type of label that ensures or improves the security of an object or data.
Event Detection: Analyzing the events in a system to check for casualties and threats in the system.
Security Audit Trial: A set of records that collectively provide documentary evidence of processing used to aid in tracing from original transactions forward to related records and reports, and/or backwards from records and reports to their component source transactions.
Security Recovery: In case of casualties in the system, the recovery of the system can be done through backtracking the security logs in the system.