The CIA Triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability

The confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) triad is a critical concept in cybersecurity, including three fundamental principles that help protect information. Organizations seeking a starting point for developing an information security framework would benefit from the triad model. 

What is the CIA Triad Security?

As more organizations move towards digital transformation strategies for product development, customer success, and financial technologies, having a clear CIA triad strategy is essential to ensuring these capital-intensive processes do not suffer a security breach.

A successful digital transformation strategy becomes the backbone of any organization's success. Cyberattacks against newly implemented transformation initiatives will prevent the organization from realizing the operational and financial windfall.

Without a CIA triad security strategy embedded within the transformation framework, organizations will continue to be a target of hackers and cybercriminals.

Individuals leveraging cybersecurity monitoring from IDStrong.com gain valuable insight into whether their data has become compromised, resulting in a loss of confidentiality, integrity, and access to their personal information. 

Confidentiality

Maintaining data confidentiality is critical for an organization's privacy and compliance mandates. Privacy data, including employee information, electronic medical records (EMR), credit reporting data, and customer information, continue to be hackers' favorite targets.

Recommendation: Enabling Multi-factor authentication (MFA) access control helps limit information exposure and maintain data confidentiality. Defining and deploying MFA helps ensure that only approved users can access critical information. 

Integrity

Sustaining integrity is essential for organizations to accurately report their financial status, inventory stock status, and employee payroll information. Hackers secretly manipulate their victims' data, including canceling orders for critical components, altering payroll records, and customer information.

Publicly traded companies report quarterly financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The CEO and CFO must sign the financial disclosures, validating that the information is accurate. Hackers breaching public companies using email phishing attacks and ransomware encrypt the data before these organizations file the reports. Holding this data hostage continues to be a common attack strategy. Organizations either leverage cyber insurance to pay the ransom or attempt to restore their systems from backup to a date before the security breach. 

Either situation places a financial burden on the organizations, calling into question the firm's ability to sustain the integrity of the information stored within their domain.

Recommendation: Organizations that recognize the risk of cyberattacks attempting to alter their data will deploy several protective layers, including Zero-trust with MFA for access control, extended detection and response (XDR) for centralized security telemetry analysis powered by artificial intelligence, and validation of hash values across their password and file system databases. 

These proven protective layers detect and protect the integrity of the data. Maintaining this integrity is also critical to ensuring the reliability of the information. Customers, business partners, and employees who trust the data are essential to the organization's success. 

Availability

Along with maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of the data, accessibility to the information is equally critical to the organization. Hackers want to disrupt access to the information by leveraging several attack vectors, including denial-of-service (DoS), email phishing, DNS poisoning, and ransomware. 

A typical availability attack occurs against airlines, financial trading systems, healthcare provider portals, and credit card processing systems. Denying access to these systems also results in compliance violations and potential lawsuits. 

Recommendation: Deploying next-generation firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), network segmentation, Zero-trust, secure edge, secure access (SASE), and SD-WAN to help ensure data and system accessibility. Organizations need to invest in backup sites for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Organizations that operate in regulated industries, including financial, government, and healthcare, are mandated backup strategies needed to mirror production and staging environments.

Why is the CIA Triad Important?

Organizations wanting to form a secure foundation to protect their most critical assets benefit significantly from initially incorporating the CIA triad model. 

Confidentiality Security Threats and Risks

Common confidentiality risks include data breaches, improper access/sharing, and accidental distribution of sensitive information. Organizations wanting to reduce these threat vectors need to limit access to the information. Any breached access from stolen credentials or password Brute Force attacks leads to these types of breaches. 

Preserving the Integrity of Data 

Preventing unauthorized data access and manipulation is critical for all organizations. Backing up data, enabling access control, and encrypting the data have all proven to safeguard data. With these adaptive protection controls, email phishing attacks that lead to financial fraud and embezzlement become preventable. 

Hashing is a common way to ensure integrity. A hash is a number generated by a file or data string hashing algorithm. If the data has stayed the same and the same algorithm is used, the hash will always be the same. The two main hashing algorithms used are MD5 and SHA-1.

Ensuring Availability

One of the most critical components of data availability and security starts with a proper network architecture. Organizations growing their internal and external network strategies based on a continuous layer of devices and overlapping architectures create vulnerable air gaps. These air caps become exploitable events, including denial-of-service attacks (DoS), ransomware, and data exfiltration breaches.

Bonding Policies to the CIA Triad Model for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)

Organizations that align their security policies for access control, encryption, change control, network segment, and cloud with the CIA triad model are more successful in preventing attacks. The policies provide the organizations' governance. The embedding of the policies in the CIA triad model helps reduce the organization's risk, and with the success of this bonding, the organizations also become more compliant. 

Organizations mandated by state, federal, and global privacy regulations, including GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA (California), and PCI-DSS, must maintain this valuable information's confidentiality. Failure to do often leads to compliance violations, client's loss of confidence in your organization, and employee lawsuits for failing to protect their personal information.

HIPAA, GPDR, PCI-DSS, and other compliance regulations require the confidentiality of data. HIPAA specifically requires encryption for data at rest and data in transit. PCI-DSS requires all credit card information to be encrypted in the same manner. GPDR also has a similar requirement for data storage and transmission.

What is an example of the CIA Triad?

Example 1: Mobile Banking 

A mobile payment app allows customers to view bank balances and transactions. Two-factor authentication is offered to users to protect sensitive information. The app stores all transfer and withdrawal histories in the user's bank account for data integrity. It is always accessible to users for convenience.

Example 2: E-Commerce 

Amazon.com is an excellent example of the CIA Triad model. The site is one the largest e-commerce sites in the world. The company offers MFA for users and product owners to access shopping sites. PCI-DSS governs Amazon.com, authorizing them to accept all major credit cards for online purchases. The company also leverages several global data centers for high availability, security, and redundancy to ensure their client's data is always accessible even during a security breach or natural disaster. 

What Are the Pros of the CIA Triad?

Every cybersecurity model, including NIST-800-53, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP, delivers exceptional benefits. The CIA Triad model is no different. 

Simplicity

Organizations embrace the CIA triad model because it is straightforward to understand. The first stage in any security framework and protection strategy starts with maintaining the data's confidentiality, preserving the data's integrity, and always ensuring data availability. These three initial pillars provided the genesis for any cybersecurity plan, regardless of the organization's size or business sector.

Balanced

The CIA triad model is a balanced strategy extending equal importance between the three pillars.

• Without confidentiality, organizations become a risk to data integrity issues.
• With the secure availability of data, organizations can avoid data breaches.
• Without data integrity, the privacy and confidentiality of information becomes a risk. 

Open-ended

The triad model leaves plenty of room for the organization to interpret the model best.

Cons of the CIA triad

Organizations leveraging the CIA triad recognize the model's benefits; however, most would agree that the framework lacked the depth and rigged structure required by most compliance and privacy mandates.

Limited

The CIA triad model provides a straightforward starting point regarding data protection. However, it doesn't offer in-depth framework recommendations or security policy examples.

Lack of Specificity

The CIA triad provides an exceptional starting point regarding how an organization should begin its data protection journey. Outside of a few suggestions, including access control, encryption, and network segmentation, the model doesn't dive into specific details, including what MFA methods or level of encryption an organization should enable. 

The CIA triad model provides a starting point for organizations when considering where to start their cybersecurity strategy. Protecting the confidentiality of the data, the integrity of information, and accessibility required layers of protection, policy, and ongoing security modeling.

Individuals also could implement the CIA triad model to protect their personal information.

Individual Confidentiality:

Users should not disclose their social security numbers, driver's license model, or home address to just anyone.

Individual Integrity:

Individuals should verify the security of a website before uploading their personal information. 

Individual Accessibility:

Do you individuals always have access to their personal information, including financial records, health records, or travel information? 

The Need to Monitor To Validate Your CIA Models.

Individuals concerned about their data confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility should subscribe to cybersecurity monitoring solutions from IDStrong.com. Their consumer monitoring service helps give individuals peace of mind by validating whether their personal data, access, and credentials became compromised.

Signup today!