2.2. Security Principles

There are many general security principles which you should be familiar with; one good place for general information on information security is the Information Assurance Technical Framework (IATF) [NSA 2000]. NIST has identified high-level ``generally accepted principles and practices'' [Swanson 1996]. You could also look at a general textbook on computer security, such as [Pfleeger 1997]. A few security principles are summarized here.

Often computer security goals are described in terms of three overall goals:

Confidentiality (also known as secrecy), meaning that the computing system's assets are accessible only by authorized parties.
Integrity, meaning that the assets can only be modified by authorized parties in authorized ways.
Availability, meaning that the assets are accessible to the authorized parties in a timely manner (as determined by the systems requirements). The failure to meet this goal is called a denial of service.

Some people define additional security goals, while others lump those additional goals as special cases of these three goals. For example, some separately identify non-repudiation as a goal; this is the ability to ``prove'' that a sender sent or receiver received a message, even if the sender or receiver wishes to deny it later. Privacy is sometimes addressed separately from confidentiality; some define this as protecting the confidentiality of a user (e.g., their identity) instead of the data. Most goals require identification and authentication, which is sometimes listed as a separate goal. Often auditing (also called accountability) is identified as a desirable security goal. Sometimes ``access control'' and ``authenticity'' are listed separately as well. In any case, it is important to identify your program's overall security goals, no matter how you group those goals together, so that you'll know when you've met them.

Sometimes these goals are a response to a known set of threats, and sometimes some of these goals are required by law. For example, for U.S. banks and other financial institutions, there's a new privacy law called the ``Gramm-Leach-Bliley'' (GLB) Act. This law mandates disclosure of personal information shared and means of securing that data, requires disclosure of personal information that will be shared with third parties, and directs institutions to give customers a chance to opt out of data sharing. [Jones 2000]

There is sometimes conflict between security and some other general system/software engineering principles. Security can sometimes interfere with ``ease of use'', for example, installing a secure configuration may take more effort than a ``trivial'' installation that works but is insecure. OFten, this apparant conflict can be resolved, for example, by re-thinking a problem it's often possible to make a secure system also easy to use. There's also sometimes a conflict between security and abstraction (information hiding); for example, some high-level library routines may be implemented securely or not, but their specifications won't tell you. In the end, if your application must be secure, you must do things yourself if you can't be sure otherwise - yes, the library should be fixed, but it's your users who will be hurt by your poor choice of library routines.

A good general security principle is ``defense in depth''; you should have numerous defense mechanisms (``layers'') in place, designed so that an attacker has to defeat multiple mechanisms to perform a successful attack.