Agent 003

--Originally published at Computer Security

Today I’ll talk about a topic really new for me, CIA, yep like the Central Intelligence Agency, and like this agency, computer security CIA look to assure security to people. CIA stands for Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability, they are security’s fundamental pillars, every computer service/system connected to Internet wants to assure at least one of them.

007.gif

Now let’s explain every one of these security agents:

Confidentiality
I’m sure all of us have some secret which we guard jealously, something we don’t want anyone to know, something highly CONFIDENTIAL. I think a secret is no secret if more than one person know about it, but let’s say you tell your bff, you AUTHORIZED him/her to know, you give him/her ACCESS to the secret. Words in capital are key to the term, confidentiality assure that non-authorized users don’t have access to the data unless the get permission.

confidential.gif

Integrity
People changes through time, we get old, wiser, etc. But history remains unchanged, no matter what we tell, (for now) there’s no way to alter the past. I love history as a subject and there’s a phrase which state “winners write the history”, that might be true, some times we read a distorted history in books, it does change our knowledge but doesn’t change history itself. Computer security fights for history to remain as it really is no matter the victor of a war, well, history is an analogy for DATA. Integrity assures the DATA has not been deleted, modified nor copied.

Availability
Who doesn’t hate when Facebook or Twitter is down? Or gamers who are playing happily and then the game kick you out and can’t access to it? Or even people in general looking for tacos at 5 am and there’s none? Availability is the agent of CIA in charge of stopping this issues

?
padrino.gif
happen, assuring resources to be available any time an authorized user wants to use them. Yeah, maybe humans are not authorized to eat tacos at 5 am and that’s why we can’t find any?

CIA has a natural enemy, some malevolent entity called RMD: Revelation, Modification, Destruction. In fact it is just the antonym of CIA xD. We must always have in mind these concepts and avoid them or our system will be completely insecure.

padrino.gif

Information retrieved from: https://sites.google.com/a/iesterrassa.cat/feines-del-segon-trimestre/noticias-de-intes/aprendiendoaserunadministradordeseguridadinformatica

They go and speak about security plans and stuff, check it if you want.