Question

The CIA model of information security is a very fundamental concept in security. Ensuring the three sides of the CIA model is protected is an important step in designing a secure system. Do you feel the CIA model provides enough security for today’s systems? Why or why not? Provide an example that supports your belief.

Answer 1

Basic Explanation:

We should know first what CIA means before going to further discussions about what we feel in our today's day-to-day life in terms of CIA model security.

What is the CIA triad? No, CIA in this case is not referring to the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA refers to Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Confidentiality of information, integrity of information and availability of information. Many security measures are designed to protect one or more facets of the CIA triad. Lets see this three sides of CIA in brief :

Confidentiality

When we talk about confidentiality of information, we are talking about protecting the information from disclosure to unauthorized parties.

Information has value, especially in today’s world. Bank account statements, personal information, credit card numbers, trade secrets, government documents. Every one has information they wish to keep a secret. Protecting such information is a very major part of information security.

A very key component of protecting information confidentiality would be encryption. Encryption ensures that only the right people (people who knows the key) can read the information. Encryption is VERY widespread in today’s environment and can be found in almost every major protocol in use. A very prominent example will be SSL/TLS, a security protocol for communications over the internet that has been used in conjunction with a large number of internet protocols to ensure security.

Other ways to ensure information confidentiality include enforcing file permissions and access control list to restrict access to sensitive information.

Keeping valuable algorithms secret

This is an excellent question on Security.Stackexchange that covers how to keep important information confidential. Similar questions can be found here.

Integrity

Integrity of information refers to protecting information from being modified by unauthorized parties.

Information only has value if it is correct. Information that has been tampered with could prove costly. For example, if you were sending an online money transfer for $100, but the information was tampered in such a way that you actually sent $10,000, it could prove to be very costly for you.

As with data confidentiality, cryptography plays a very major role in ensuring data integrity. Commonly used methods to protect data integrity includes hashing the data you receive and comparing it with the hash of the original message. However, this means that the hash of the original data must be provided to you in a secure fashion. More convenient methods would be to use existing schemes such as GPG to digitally sign the data.

Why aren’t application downloads routinely done over HTTPS?

This is a question regarding data integrity, with several suggestions on how to protect data integrity. You can find more questions with the integrity tag here.

Availability

Availability of information refers to ensuring that authorized parties are able to access the information when needed.

Information only has value if the right people can access it at the right times. Denying access to information has become a very common attack nowadays. Almost every week you can find news about high profile websites being taken down by DDoS attacks. The primary aim of DDoS attacks is to deny users of the website access to the resources of the website. Such downtime can be very costly. Other factors that could lead to lack of availability to important information may include accidents such as power outages or natural disasters such as floods.

How does one ensure data availability? Backup is key. Regularly doing off-site backups can limit the damage caused by damage to hard drives or natural disasters. For information services that is highly critical, redundancy might be appropriate. Having a off-site location ready to restore services in case anything happens to your primary data centers will heavily reduce the downtime in case of anything happens.

Now its come to the main question about what we feel the CIA model provides enough security for today’s systems or not?

The CIA triad is a very fundamental concept in security. Often, ensuring that the three facets of the CIA triad is protected is an important step in designing any secure system. However, it has been suggested that the CIA triad is not enough. Alternative models such as the Parkerian hexad (Confidentiality, Possession or Control, Integrity, Authenticity, Availability and Utility) have been proposed. Other factors besides the three facets of the CIA triad are also very important in certain scenarios, such as non-repudiation.But CIA model is just not enough for security measures in a large scale where data breaching or hacking may done leading to major loss.Many others models are been researched for being not the replacement for CIA model but to add some more things to it only. There have been debates over the pros and cons of such alternative models.

The best example to explain that CIA model is not enough is :

More than 300 Cisco switch models vulnerable to CIA hack:

A cache of CIA documents was dropped on the internet two weeks ago via WikiLeaks. It was a huge volume of data, some of which detailed CIA tools for breaking into smartphones and even smart TVs. Now, Cisco has said its examination of the documents points to a gaping security hole in more than 300 models of its switches. There’s no patch for this critical vulnerability, but it’s possible to mitigate the risk with some settings changes.The specific code used to gain access to the switches was not included in the documents dumped by WikiLeaks. The organization claimed it would disclose those to companies privately in order to get the holes patched. However, Motherboard reports that has yet to happen.