Top 5 Elements of Information Security Policy | CIA Triad

What is an Information Security Policy?

An information security policy (ISP) is a set of rules that guide individuals who work with IT assets. Your company can create an information security policy to ensure your employees and other users follow security protocols and procedures. An updated and current security policy ensures that sensitive information can only be accessed by authorized users.

What are the Various Elements of an Information Security Policy?

For fulfilling all the security-related constraints and requirements, researchers and security analysts have come up with some unique concepts that, when preserved, can help in keeping the system safe and secure. If anyone of the elements gets compromised, there is a potential risk for the information and the system.

5 Elements of an Information Security Policy / CIA Triad

Confidentiality: The confidentiality of information is a very important element of an information security policy. It is the guarantee that the information is kept confidential and only shared with authorized users.
Integrity: This refers to the techniques to ensure that all the data or resources that can be accessed in real-time are legitimate, correct, and protected from unlawful user (hackers) modification. Data integrity has become a primary and essential component or element of information security because users have to trust online information to use them. Data integrity is verified through techniques like checksums, change in hash values, and data comparison.
Availability: As the name suggests, availability specifies whether the data or resource is available when required or requested by the client. The information that has been requested will possess the actual value only when legitimate users can access those resources at the right time. Cybercriminals seize those data so that the request to access those resources gets denied (leads to downtime of a working server), which is a conventional attack.

Aditional Elements

Authenticity: Authenticity is another essential element, and authentication can be defined as the process of ensuring and confirming that the identity of the user is genuine and legitimate. This authentication process takes place when the user tries to gain access to any data or information (commonly done by login or biometric access). However, cybercriminals use more sophisticated tools and techniques to gain such access using social engineering, password guessing, brute force techniques, or cracking ciphers.
Non-repudiation: can be defined as the way of assurance that message transmitted among two or more users via digital signature or through encryption is accurate, and no one can deny the authentication of the digital signature on any document. Authentic data and its origination can be acquired with the help of a data hash.