Maina Assignment1
Maina Assignment1
Maina Assignment1
TECHNOLOGY
ASSIGNMEN21T
RESEARCH PROPOSAL
ABSTRACT
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1. Introduction
Information Systems are decomposed in three main portions, 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 the organizations. In the
following sections of this paper, we study elements related to IT security and
finally review the effectiveness of current technologies related to IT Security.
LITERATURE REVIEW
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2. 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.
Governments, military, corporations, financial institutions, hospitals, and
private businesses amass a great deal of confidential information about their
employees, customers, products, research, and financial status. Most of this
information is now collected, processed and stored on electronic computers and
transmitted across networks to other computers.
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Figure 1. Information Security Components: or qualities,
Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA).
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3. Basic Principles
3.1 Key concepts
For over twenty years, information security has held confidentiality, integrity
and availability (known as the CIA triad) as the core principles of information
security. Many information security professionals firmly believe that
Accountability should be added as a core principle of information security.
3.2 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.
Breaches of confidentiality take many forms. Permitting someone to look over
your shoulder at your computer screen 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.
3.3 Integrity
In information security, integrity means that data cannot be modified without
authorization. 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.
Integrity could be violated without malicious intent in many ways. In the
simplest case, a user on a system could mis-type someone's address. On a larger
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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.
3.4 Availability
For any information system to serve its purpose, the information must be
available when it is needed. This means that the computing systems used to store
and process the information, the security controls used to protect it, and the
communication channels used to access it must be functioning correctly. High
availability systems aim to remain available at all times, preventing service
disruptions due to power outages, hardware failures, and system upgrades.
Ensuring availability also involves preventing denial-of service attacks.
In 2002, Donn Parker proposed an alternative model for the classic CIA triad
that he called the six atomic elements of information. The elements are
confidentiality, possession, integrity, authenticity, availability, and utility. The
merits of the Parkerian hexad are a subject of debate amongst security
professionals.
3.5 Authenticity
In computing, e-Business and information security, it is necessary to ensure
that the data, transactions, communications or documents (electronic or physical)
are genuine. It is also important for authenticity to validate that both parties
involved are who they claim they are.
3.6 Non-repudiation
In law, non-repudiation implies one's intention to fulfill their obligations to a
contract. It also implies that one party of a transaction cannot deny having
received a transaction nor can the other party deny having sent a transaction.
Electronic commerce uses technology such as digital signatures and encryption
to establish authenticity and nonrepudiation.
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The CISA Review Manual 2006 provides the following definition of risk
management: "Risk management is the process of identifying vulnerabilities and
threats to the information resources used by an organization in achieving
business objectives, and deciding what countermeasures, if any, to take in
reducing risk to an acceptable level, based on the value of the information
resource to the organization."[2]
There are two things in this definition that may need some clarification. First,
the process of risk management is an ongoing iterative process. It must be
repeated indefinitely. The business environment is constantly changing and new
threats and vulnerability emerge every day. Second, the choice of
countermeasures (controls) used to manage risks must strike a balance between
productivity, cost, effectiveness of the countermeasure, and the value of the
informational asset being protected.
Risk is the likelihood that something bad will happen that causes harm to an
informational asset (or the loss of the asset). A vulnerability is a weakness that
could be used to endanger or cause harm to an informational asset. A threat is
anything (man-made or act of nature) that has the potential to cause harm.
The likelihood that a threat will use a vulnerability to cause harm creates a
risk. When a threat does use a vulnerability to inflict harm, it has an impact. In
the context of information security, the impact is a loss of availability, integrity,
and confidentiality, and possibly other losses (lost income, loss of life, loss of
real property). It should be pointed out that it is not possible to identify all risks,
nor is it possible to eliminate all risk. The remaining risk is called residual risk.
A risk assessment is carried out by a team of people who have knowledge of
specific areas of the business. Membership of the team may vary over time as
different parts of the business are assessed. The assessment may use a subjective
qualitative analysis based on informed opinion, or where reliable dollar figures
and historical information is available, the analysis may use quantitative
analysis. The ISO/IEC 27002:2005 Code of practice for information security
management recommends the following be examined during a risk assessment:
security policy,
organization of information security,
asset management,
human resources security,
physical and environmental security,
communications and operations management,
access control,
information systems acquisition, development and maintenance,
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information security incident management,
business continuity management, and
Regulatory compliance.
4. Controls
When Management chooses to mitigate a risk, they will do so by
implementing one or more of three different types of controls.
4.1 Administrative controls
Administrative controls (also called procedural controls) consist of approved
written policies, procedures, standards and guidelines. Administrative controls
form the framework for running the business and managing people. They inform
people on how the business is to be run and how day-to-day operations are to be
conducted. Laws and regulations created by government bodies are also a type of
administrative control because they inform the business. Some industry sectors
have policies, procedures, standards and guidelines that must be followed - the
Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard required by Visa and
Master Card is such an example. Other examples of administrative controls
include the corporate security policy, password policy, hiring policies, and
disciplinary policies.
Administrative controls form the basis for the selection and implementation of
logical and physical controls. Logical and physical controls are manifestations of
administrative controls. Administrative controls are of paramount importance.
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duties are frequently added onto their already existing access privileges which
may no longer be necessary or appropriate.
5. Cryptography
Information security uses cryptography to transform usable information into a
form that renders it unusable by anyone other than an authorized user; this
process is called encryption. Information that has been encrypted (rendered
unusable) can be transformed back into its original usable form by an authorized
user, who possesses the cryptographic key, through the process of decryption.
Cryptography is used in information security to protect information from
unauthorized or accidental disclosure while the information is in transit (either
electronically or physically) and while information is in storage. [4]
Cryptography provides information security with other useful applications as
well including improved authentication methods, message digests, digital
signatures, nonrepudiation, and encrypted network communications. Older less
secure application such as telnet and ftp are slowly being replaced with more
secure applications such as ssh that use encrypted network communications.
Wireless communications can be encrypted using the WPA or WEP protocols.
Wired communications (such as ITU-T G.hn) are secured using AES for
encryption and X.1035 for authentication and key exchange. Software
applications such as GNUPG or PGP can be used to encrypt data files and Email.
Cryptography can introduce security problems when it is not implemented
correctly. Cryptographic solutions need to be implemented using industry
accepted solutions that have undergone rigorous peer review by independent
experts in cryptography. The length and strength of the encryption key is also an
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important consideration. A key that is weak or too short will produce weak
encryption. The keys used for encryption and decryption must be protected with
the same degree of rigor as any other confidential information. They must be
protected from unauthorized disclosure and destruction and they must be
available when needed. PKI solutions address many of the problems that
surround key management.
6. Informational Privacy
Data privacy refers to the evolving relationship between technology and the
legal right to, or public expectation of privacy in the collection and sharing of
data about one's self. Privacy concerns exist wherever uniquely identifiable data
relating to a person or persons are collected and stored, in digital form or
otherwise. In some cases, these concerns refer to how data is collected, stored,
and associated. In other cases, the issue is who is given access to information.
Other issues include whether an individual has any ownership rights to data
about them, and/or the right to view, verify, and challenge that information.
Various types of personal information often come under privacy concerns. For
various reasons, individuals may not wish for personal information such as their
religion, sexual orientation, political affiliations, or personal activities to be
revealed. This may be to avoid discrimination, personal embarrassment, or
damage to one's professional reputation.
Financial privacy, in which information about a person's financial transactions
is guarded, is important for the avoidance of fraud or identity theft. Information
about a person's purchases can also reveal a great deal about that person's history,
such as places they have visited, whom they have had contact with, products
they use, their activities and habits, or medications they have used.
Internet privacy is the ability to control what information one reveals about
oneself over the Internet, and to control who can access that information. These
concerns include whether email can be stored or read by third parties without
consent, or whether third parties can track the web sites someone has visited.
Another concern is whether web sites which are visited collect, store, and
possibly share personally identifiable information about users.
Medical privacy allows a person to keep their medical records from being
revealed to others. This may be because they have concern that it might affect
their insurance coverage or employment. Or it may be because they would not
wish for others to know about medical or psychological conditions or treatment
which would be embarrassing. Revealing medical data could also reveal other
details about one's personal life (such as about one's sexual activity for example).
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Sexual privacy prevents a person from being forced to carry a pregnancy to
term and enables individuals to acquire and use contraceptives and safe sex
supplies and information without community or legal review.
Political privacy has been a concern since voting systems emerged in ancient
times. The secret ballot is the simplest and most widespread measure to ensure
that political views are not known to anyone other than the original voter it is
nearly universal in modern democracy, and considered a basic right of
citizenship. In fact even where other rights of privacy do not exist, this type of
privacy very often does.
8. Access Control
Access control is the traditional center of gravity of computer security. It is
where security engineering meets computer science. Its function is to control
which principals (persons, processes, machines, etc.) have access to which
resources in the system which files they can read, which programs they can
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execute, how they share data with other principals, and so on. Access control
works at a number of levels, as shown in Figure 2, and described in the
following:
1. The access control mechanisms, which the user sees at the application
level, may express a very rich and complex security policy. A modern
online business could assign staff to one of dozens of different roles, each
of which could initiate some subset of several hundred possible
transactions in the system. Some of these (such as credit card transactions
with customers) might require online authorization from a third party while
others (such as refunds) might require dual control.
2. The applications may be written on top of middleware, such as a database
management system or bookkeeping package, which enforces a number of
protection properties. For example, bookkeeping software may ensure that
a transaction that debits one ledger for a certain amount must credit another
ledger for the same amount.
3. The middleware will use facilities provided by the underlying operating
system. As this constructs resources such as files and communications ports
from lower-level components, it acquires the responsibility for providing
ways to control access to them.
4. Finally, the operating system access controls will usually rely on hardware
features provided by the processor or by associated memory management
hardware. These control which memory addresses a given process can
access.
As we work up from the hardware through the operating system and
middleware to the application layer, the controls become progressively more
complex and less reliable. Most actual computer frauds involve staff accidentally
discovering features of the application code that they can exploit in an
opportunistic way or just abusing features of the application that they were
trusted not to. But in this chapter, we will focus on the fundamentals: access
control at the hardware and operating system level.
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Figure 2. Access controls at different levels in a system.
As with the other building blocks discussed so far, access control makes sense
only in the context of a protection goal, typically expressed as a security policy.
This puts us at a slight disadvantage when discussing PCs running single-user
operating systems such as DOS and Win95/98, which have no overt security
policy: any process can modify any data. People do have implicit protection
goals, though; you do not expect a shrink-wrap program to trash your hard disk.
Therefore, an explicit security policy is a good idea, especially when products
support some features that appear to provide protection, such as login IDs. [6]
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Once again, if there is no top class, we add a top class. Then the CA assigns a
name to each class as in Fig. 2. Note that, in a lower tree, there is a unique class,
denoted by c(Uk), which covers a class Uk of a lower tree with top class
Now the CA selects a key K belonging to the top class and a one-way hash
function H.
The CA computes KUk = H(Uk,Kc(Uk)) and distributes it together with H to
each class Uk.
Then the users in an upper class can compute all keys belonging to the classes
lower than theirs using their keys, hash function H, and names of lower classes.
(See Table 1.) Because of the one-wayness of the hash function, a user in Uk can
not compute others keys belonging to upper classes.
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Figure 3. Intra-Domain Architecture
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Figure 4. Inter-Domain Architecture
However, as well see a little later, de-scoping may occur at regular points
through the lifecycle, resulting in hybrid projects. So, for example, a solution
assembly project could branch into separate smaller assembly, provisioning and
integration projects. Also software requirements techniques may also be used
within a e-business domain services. They are especially useful in conjunction
with prototyping, as a means of scouting ahead to explore different designs.
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Figure 5. Component Security Assuring Dimension
The security requirements for each classification level are defined, based on
the organizations particular application of the technology. The model includes
categories for security, and the criteria by which the information is to be secured.
Categories relate to both business processes (applications and component) and
information technologies (hardware, software and services) that support that
environment. The categories define a comprehensive structure for IT risk
management issues and represent the components of the information systems
environment.
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9.3.2 Assuring Security Model in Component. The proposed approach for
assuring security in components is illustrated by the Component Security
Assurance (CSA) dimension as in Figure 5. The CSA dimension is an
architecture for providing security oriented testing processes to a software
component. The dimension consists of several processes including the
construction of test plans, analysis using white- box testing techniques, black-
box testing techniques, and the stamping with a digital signature of the relative
security rating based on the metrics evaluated through the testing. The processes
are broken out into sub-pipes of test plans, white-box testing, and black-box
testing. The first stage to component certification is the development of a test
plan. The application in which the JavaBean component will be used will
influence the security policy, test suites, assertions, and fault perturbations used
in both whitebox and black-box testing processes.
Based on the security policy, input generation will make use of test suites
delivered from the applicant for certification as well as malicious inputs d signed
to violate the security policy. The definition of the security policy is used to code
security assertions that dynamically monitor component vulnerability during
security analyses. Finally, perturbation classes are generated for white-box fault
injection analysis according to the application in which the component will be
used.
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objects (personal information) when information permission policy and
information request policy are agreed on properly.
10. Conclusion
References
[1] U.S. Code collection http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/44/3542.html
[2] Wikepedia IT Security
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security
[3]"Segregation of Duties Control matrix". ISACA
http://www.isaca.org/AMTemplate.cfm?
Section=CISA1&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDispla
y.cfm&ContentID=40835
[4] Wikepedia Cryptgraphy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography
[5] Wikepedia Informational Privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy
[6] Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed
Systems http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-04.pdf
[7] Hwankoo Kim, Bongjoo Park, JaeCheol Ha, Byoungcheon Lee,
DongGook Park, "New Key Management
Systems for Multilevel Security", O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2005,
LNCS 3481
[8] Sung Ki Kim, Byoung Joon Min, Jin Chul Jung, and Seung Hwan Yoo,
"Cooperative Security
Management Enhancing Survivability against DDoS Attacks", O. Gervasi et
al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2005, LNCS 3481
[9] Gu-Beom Jeong and Guk-Boh Kim, "A Framework for Security
Assurance in Component Based
Development" , O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2005, LNCS 3481
[10] Hyang-Chang Choi, Yong-Hoon Yi, Jae-Hyun Seo, Bong-Nam Noh, and
Hyung-Hyo Lee, "A Privacy Protection Model in ID Management Using
Access Control", O. Gervasi et al. (Eds.): ICCSA 2005, LNCS 3481
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