3.1 Planning Your Security Needs

There are many different kinds of computer security, and many different definitions. Rather than present a formal definition, this book takes a practical approach and discusses the categories of protection you should consider. Basically, we a computer is secure if it behaves the way you expect it to. We believe that secure computers are usable computers and, likewise, that computers that cannot be used, for whatever the reason, are not very secure.

3.1.1 Types of Security

Within our broad definition of computer security, there are many different types of security that both users and administrators of computer systems need to be concerned about:

Confidentiality

Protecting information from being read or copied by anyone who has not been explicitly authorized by the owner of that information. This type of security includes not only protecting the information in toto, but also protecting individual pieces of information that may seem harmless by themselves but can be used to infer other confidential information.

Data integrity

Protecting information (including programs) from being deleted or altered in any way without the permission of the owner of that information. Information to be protected also includes items such as accounting records, backup tapes, file creation times, and documentation.

Availability

Protecting your services so they're not degraded or made unavailable (crashed) without authorization. If the systems or data are unavailable when an authorized user needs them, the result can be as bad as having the information that resides on the system deleted.

Consistency

Making sure that the system behaves as expected by the authorized users. If software or hardware suddenly starts behaving radically different from the way it used to behave, especially after an upgrade or a bug fix, a disaster could occur. Imagine if your ls command occasionally deleted files instead of listing them! This type of security can also be considered as ensuring the correctness of the data and software you use.

Control

Regulating access to your system. If unknown and unauthorized individuals (or software) are found on your system, they can create a big problem. You must worry about how they got in, what they might have done, and who or what else has also accessed your system. Recovering from such episodes can require considerable time and expense in rebuilding and reinstalling your system, and verifying that nothing important has been changed or disclosed—even if nothing actually happened.

Audit

As well as worrying about unauthorized users, you need to realize that authorized users sometimes make mistakes, or even commit malicious acts. In such cases, you need to determine what was done, by whom, and what was affected. The only sure way to achieve these results is by having some incorruptible record of activity on your system that positively identifies the actors and actions involved. In some critical applications, the audit trail may be extensive enough to allow "undo" operations to help restore the system to a correct state.

Although all of these aspects of security are important, different organizations will view each with a different amount of importance. This variance is because different organizations have different security concerns, and must set their priorities and policies accordingly. For example:

A banking environment

In such an environment, integrity, control, and auditability are usually the most critical concerns, while confidentiality and availability are less important.

A national defense-related system that processes classified information

In such an environment, confidentiality may come first, and availability last. In some highly classified environments, officials may prefer to blow up a building rather than allow an attacker to access the information contained within that building's walls.

A university

In such an environment, integrity and availability may be the most important requirements. It is more important to ensure that students can work on their papers, than that administrators can track the precise times their students accessed their accounts.

If you are a security administrator, you need to thoroughly understand the needs of your operational environment and users. You then need to define your procedures accordingly. Not everything we describe in this book will be appropriate in every environment.

3.1.2 Trust

Security professionals generally don't refer to a computer system as being "secure" or "unsecure."^[1] Instead, we use the word trust to describe our level of confidence that a computer system will behave as expected. This acknowledges that absolute security can never be present. We can only try to approach it by developing enough trust in the overall configuration to warrant using it for the applications we have in mind.

^[1] We use the term unsecure to mean having weak security, and insecure to describe the state of mind of people running unsecure systems.

Developing adequate trust in your computer systems requires careful thought and planning. Operational decisions should be based on sound policy and risk analysis. In the remainder of this chapter, we'll discuss the general procedures for creating workable security plans and policies. The topic is too big, however, for us to provide an in-depth treatment:

• If you are at a company, university, or government agency, we suggest that you contact your internal audit and/or risk management department for additional help (they may already have some plans and policies in place that you should know about). You can also learn more about this topic by consulting some of the works referenced in Appendix C. You may also wish to enlist a consulting firm. For example, many large accounting and audit firms now have teams of professionals that can evaluate the security of computer installations.

• If you are with a smaller institution or are dealing with a personal machine, you may decide that we cover these issues in greater detail than you actually need. Nevertheless, the information contained in this chapter should help guide you in setting your priorities.