The CIA Triad are three guiding model of information security.

  • Confidentiality: data can’t be accessed by unauthorized party
  • Integrity: data can’t be changed by attackers
  • Availability: ensuring data and network resources are accessible to authorized users when needed.

It is sometimes pointed out that the CIA triad may not be sufficient. For example, issues like non-repudiation does not fit well with the triad.

Confidentiality

The primary way to maintain confidentiality is through encryption.

Integrity

There are various ways to ensure integrity, often involving hashing; examples include MACs and digital signatures.

Related to consistency in the ACID model of transaction processing.

Hashing

A main threat of availability is the DDoS attack. This can be mitigated by strategies such as redundancy, rate limiters, or load balancers.