Class 06 - birlzhimself/401-Reading-Notes GitHub Wiki

You have been made responsible for the company’s file server. How would you preserve the three elements of the CIA triad?

As the person responsible for the company's file server, it is essential to preserve the three elements of the CIA triad, which are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. To preserve confidentiality, access to sensitive data should be restricted only to authorized personnel who require it to perform their jobs. This can be achieved by implementing access controls such as user authentication, password policies, and role-based access control.

To preserve integrity, measures must be taken to ensure that data stored on the file server is not tampered with or modified in any unauthorized way. This can be achieved by implementing file permissions and access control lists, monitoring file system activity, and using data hashing techniques.

Availability refers to ensuring that the data on the file server is always accessible when required. This can be achieved by implementing backup and disaster recovery procedures, load balancing, and server redundancy.

Explain how hashing verifies data integrity using non-technical terms.

Hashing is a technique used to verify data integrity, which ensures that the data has not been tampered with or modified in any way during transmission or storage. In non-technical terms, hashing can be compared to a fingerprint that uniquely identifies a person. Similarly, a hash function generates a unique code, or hash, for a file, which serves as a digital fingerprint.

If the file is altered in any way, even if just a single bit of data is changed, the hash will also change. This makes it easy to detect whether the data has been tampered with by comparing the hash of the original file with the hash of the modified file.

How is hashing and encryption different?

Hashing and encryption are different techniques that serve different purposes. Hashing is primarily used for data integrity checks, whereas encryption is used to protect the confidentiality of data. Encryption transforms the original data into a coded form that can only be deciphered with a key, whereas hashing generates a fixed-length code that uniquely identifies the original data. While encryption can be reversed, hashing is a one-way process, and it is impossible to reconstruct the original data from its hash.