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6 Security, privacy and data

integrity

1.6.1 Data security

Computer security is a branch of technology known asapplied information security to computers

and networks.
The objective of computer security includes:
Protection of information & property from theft
Corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to remain
accessible and productive to its intended users.

Introduction

Information Systems are made of three subclasses, hardware, software and communications with the
purpose to identify and apply information security industry standards, as mechanisms of protection and
prevention, at three levels or layers: Physical, personal and organizational. Essentially, procedures or
policies are implemented to tell people (administrators, users and operators) how to use products to ensure
information security within their organizations.

IT Security

Information security means protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access, use,
disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction. The terms information security, computer security and
information assurance are frequently incorrectly used interchangeably. These fields are interrelated often and
share the common goals of protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information; however,
there are some subtle differences between them.

These differences lie primarily in the approach to the subject, the methodologies used, and the areas of
concentration. Information security is concerned with the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data
regardless of the form the data may take: electronic, print, or other forms. Computer security can focus on
ensuring the availability and correct operation of a computer system without concern for the information
stored or processed by the computer

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is the term used to prevent the disclosure of information to unauthorized

Individuals or systems. For example, a credit card transaction on the Internet requires the credit card number
to be transmitted from the buyer to the merchant and from the Merchant to a transaction processing network.
The system attempts to enforce confidentiality by encrypting the card number during transmission, by limiting
the places where it might appear (in databases, log files, backups, printed receipts, and so on), and by
restricting access to the places where it is stored. If an unauthorized party obtains the card number in any way,
a breach of confidentiality has occurred.

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Breaches of confidentiality take many forms. Someone looking at your computer screen behind your back
while you have confidential data displayed on it could be a breach of confidentiality. If a laptop computer
containing sensitive information about a company's employees is stolen or sold, it could result in a breach of
confidentiality.
Giving out confidential information over the telephone is a breach of confidentiality if the caller is not
authorized to have the information. Confidentiality is necessary (but not sufficient) for maintaining the
privacy of the people whose personal information a system holds.

Integrity

In information security, integrity means that data cannot be modified without permission. This is not the same
thing as referential integrity in databases. Integrity is violated when an employee accidentally or with
malicious intent deletes important data files, when a computer virus infects a computer, when an employee is
able to modify his own salary in a payroll database, when an unauthorized user vandalizes a web site, when
someone is able to cast a very large number of votes in an online poll, and so on.

There are many ways in which integrity could be violated without malicious intent. In the simplest case, a user
on a system could mis-type someone's address. On a larger scale, if an automated process is not written and
tested correctly, bulk updates to a database could alter data in an incorrect way, leaving the integrity of the
data compromised.

Information security professionals are tasked with finding ways to implement controls that prevent errors of
integrity.

Basic System Security Measures

These Basic System Security Measures apply to all systems. It is a baseline, which all systems must meet.
Note that for most personal workstations, these are the only measures that apply. The requirements are:

1. Authentication and Authorization

Remove or disable accounts upon loss of eligibility: Accounts which are no longer needed
must be disabled in a timely fashion using an automated or documented procedure.
Separate user and administrator accounts: Administrator accounts must not be used for
non-administrative purposes. System administrators must be provisioned with non-
administrator accounts for end-user activities, and a separate administrator account that is
used only for system-administration purposes.
Use unique passwords for administrator accounts: Privileged accounts must use unique
passwords that are not shared among multiple systems. Credentials which are managed
centrally, such as the NetID/password combination, are considered a single account,
regardless of how many systems they provide access to.

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Throttle repeated unsuccessful login-attempts: A maximum rate for unsuccessful login

attempts must be enforced. Account lockout is not required, but the rate of unsuccessful
logins must be limited.
Enable session timeout: Sessions must be locked or closed after some reasonable period.
Enforce least privilege: Non-administrative accounts must be used whenever possible. User
accounts and server processes must be granted the least-possible level of privilege that allows
them to perform their function.

2. Firewall
Systems must be protected by a firewall that allows only those incoming connections
necessary to fulfill the business needs of that system. Client systems which have no business need to
provide network services must deny all incoming connections. Systems that provide network services
must limit access to those services to the smallest reasonably manageable group of hosts that need to
reach them.

3. Password Protection

All accounts and resources must be protected by passwords which meet the following
requirements, which must be automatically enforced by the system:
Must be at least eight characters long.
Must NOT be dictionary or common slang words in any language, or be relatively easy to
guess.
Must include at least three of the following four characteristics, in any order: upper case
letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters, such as “!@#$%^&*”.
Must be changed at least once per year.

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4. Digital signature
It is basically a way to ensure that an electronic document (e-mail, spreadsheet, text file, etc.)
is authentic. Authentic means that you know who created the document and you know that it has not
been altered in any way since that person created it.

Digital signatures rely on certain types of encryption to ensure authentication. Encryption is the process
of taking all the data that one computer is sending to another and encoding it into a form that only the
other computer will be able to decode. Authentication is the process of verifying that information is
coming from a trusted source. These two processes work hand in hand for digital signatures.

Security measures designed to protect the security of data

Data Backup: Data protection is crucial for protecting your business's continuity. If your only data backup is
on a computer and the hard disk crashes or is damaged by a power surge, your business’s data is gone. And
having paper copies of business data isn't adequate data protection; what if your business premises burns to
the ground or destroyed in a flood? Once again the data you need to carry on your business could be
irretrievably lost.

For adequate data protection, you need to establish a data backup system that follows these three steps:

1) Archive the business data regularly;

2) Create data backups on reliable media;
3) Keep updated data backups in a secure, off-site location.

The basic rule for business data protection is that if losing the data will interfere with doing business, then you
should back it up. You can reinstall software programs if you need to, but recovering the details of transactions
or business correspondence is impossible if those files are lost or damaged beyond repair.
The rest of this article outlines each of the steps listed above so you can establish a data backup system that
will effectively protect your critical business data from disaster.

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1) Archiving Critical Business Data

Archiving business data is more than a matter of good housekeeping; it could be a matter of your business's
survival.

There are two steps to archiving business data for successful data backup:

1) Identify the critical data that needs to be archived

2) Use a data archiving method on a regular basis.

2) Creating Physical Data Backups

Physical data backups are necessary because of the possibility of computer failure or damage. Even a minor
accident such as spilling a cup of coffee onto your laptop could destroy all your data, if that's the only place
your data resides. You should create physical data backups of your business data at least once a week, or even
more often if your business generates large amounts of new data daily. There are several methods of
transferring your backup files to another media, but some data backup systems are more reliable than others.

3) Off-Site Data Backup

The only businesses that should be keeping their data backups on-site are those with fire-proof, indestructible
safes. Investing in a tape drive or external hard drive and meticulously adhering to a regular data backup
schedule won't help if all your data backup copies are in one place and that place is struck by disaster. You
must store copies of your backups off-site if your business data is to be truly secure.

It is essential to back up the data on servers and other data systems throughout your network. That is obvious.
This section describes a number of ways you can perform backups, including copying data to magnetic tape or
optical disks, or by copying or replicating information to other systems. Before getting started, take note of the
following terminology:

A backup is a copy of online storage information that provides fault protection.

An archive is a historical backup.

An online storage device is a high-performance magnetic disk that stores information that users can
access frequently. Nearline and offline storage devices are slower, secondary storage devices that
provide backup services or archiving services.

Hierarchical file systems move little-used files or large image files from online storage to nearline
storage systems such as optical disk, where they remain available to users.

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Tape backup systems are the traditional backup medium while optical disk systems provide archiving
and nearline storage requirements

Real-time backups take place at any time and must have a procedure for handling files that are open
during backup. In most cases, the backup system tracks open files and returns to back them up later.

Disk mirroring is a real-time strategy that writes data to two or more disks at the same time. If one
disk fails, the other continues to operate and provide access for users. Server mirroring provides the
same functionality, except that an entire server is duplicated. This strategy allows users to continue
accessing data if one of the servers fails. See "Fault Tolerance and High Availability" for additional
information on these strategies.

Replication copies information to alternate servers on distributed networks to make that information
more readily available to people in other locations. While replication is not necessarily a backup
technique, replicated data on remote servers can be made available to local users should the server
close to them go down.

Remote vaulting is an automatic backup technique that transmits data to alternate sites. The alternate
sites can be more than just warehouses for backups. They may be entire data centers that can be
brought online when the primary data center goes offline in the event of a major disaster.

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Encryption:

The translation of data into a secret code. Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security.
To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it.
Unencrypted data is called plain text ; encrypted data is referred to as cipher text.
There are two main types of encryption: asymmetric encryption (also called public-key encryption)
and symmetric encryption.

Symmetric encryption is where the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the message. This differs
from asymmetric (or public-key) encryption, which uses one key to encrypt a message and another to decrypt
the message.

A cryptographic system that uses two keys -- a public key known to everyone and a private or secret
key known only to the recipient of the message.
When John wants to send a secure message to Jane, he uses Jane's public key toencrypt the message. Jane then
uses her private key to decrypt it.
An important element to the public key system is that the public and private keys are related in such a way
that only the public key can be used to encrypt messages and only the corresponding private key can be used
to decrypt them. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to deduce the private key if you know the public key.

Public-key systems, such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), are becoming popular for transmitting information
via the Internet. They are extremely secure and relatively simple to use. The only difficulty with public-key
systems is that you need to know the recipient's public key to encrypt a message for him or her. What's
needed, therefore, is a global registry of public keys, which is one of the promises of the
new LDAP technology.
Public key cryptography was invented in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. For this reason, it is
sometime called Diffie-Hellman encryption. It is also called asymmetric encryption because it uses two keys
instead of one (symmetric encryption).

What is Access Control?

Access Control is any mechanism by which a system grants or revokes the right to access some data, or
perform some action. Normally, a user must first Login to a system, using some Authentication system. Next,
the Access Control mechanism will controls what operations the user may or may not make by comparing
the User ID to an Access Control database.

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Access Control systems include:

File permissions, such as create, read, edit or delete on a file server.
Program permissions, such as the right to execute a program on an applicationserver.

Data rights, such as the right to retrieve or update information in a database.

Data Integrity vs Data Security

Data is the most important asset to any organization. Therefore, it must be made sure that data is valid and
secure at all times. Data integrity and Data security are two important aspects of making sure that data is
useable by its intended users. Data integrity makes sure that the data is valid. Data security makes sure that
data is protected against loss and unauthorized access.

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