Goals of Computer Security

In computer security, the fundamental objectives revolve around ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of managed information. Let's explore the interrelationship among these three critical aspects.

1. Integrity

Data integrity within computer security concern to ensuring that data remains unaltered or unmodified. Essentially, integrity aims to prevent unauthorized modifications and maintain the preciseness, accuracy, or acceptable modifications authorized by specific individuals.

Tools for Ensuring Integrity in Cybersecurity:

• Backups: Regularly archiving data to prepare for potential loss or destruction, often serving historical or compliance purposes.
• Checksums: Using numerical values to verify the integrity of files or data transfers, ensuring data consistency and identifying alterations.
• Data Correction Codes: Techniques to identify and rectify slight data modifications automatically.

2. Confidentiality

Confidentiality involves preventing unauthorized access to computer systems, ensuring that only authorized individuals access sensitive information. Not all data stored in a computer system is confidential; some information can be made public. However, critical or sensitive data necessitates confidentiality. It's worth noting that data confidentiality relies on the presence of data integrity. Examples of data requiring confidentiality encompass credit card files, medical records, personnel data, mission-critical, and research and development (R&D) data.

Tools for Ensuring Confidentiality in Cybersecurity:

• Encryption: This involves altering data using an algorithm, rendering it unintelligible to unauthorized users. It transforms sensitive data into unreadable ciphertext, ensuring secure transmission and storage.
• Access Control: Governed by rules and procedures, it grants authorized users access to resources or systems, enforcing stringent verification processes for access.
• Authentication & Authorization: Essential in verifying user identity and assessing resource access based on predefined policies, ensuring authenticated users gain appropriate permissions.
• Physical Security: Protects IT assets against theft, vandalism, and natural calamities, securing premises, equipment, and resources.

3. Availability

While securing a computer system is crucial, it's equally vital that authorized users can access necessary data for effective job performance. Availability in a computer system means:

• Ensuring acceptable response times.
• Fair resource allocation.
• Implementing fault tolerance mechanisms.
• Designing user-friendly interfaces.
• Incorporating concurrency control and deadlock management, which will be further discussed in the operating system course.

Ensuring availability means that the system is accessible to authorized personnel at appropriate times, facilitating efficient operations without compromising security.

Tools for Ensuring Availability in Cybersecurity:

• Physical Protection: Safeguarding sensitive data and crucial technologies in secure locations, ensuring accessibility despite physical challenges.
• Computational Redundancy: Employed as a fault-tolerant system against failures, safeguarding data with backup systems and devices.