What is the CIA Triad? Definition, Importance, & Examples

Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. These are the three core components of the CIA triad, an information security model meant to guide an organization’s security procedures and policies.

While people outside the information security community might hear the phrase “CIA Triad” and think “conspiracy theory,” those in the cybersecurity field know that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Instead, the CIA triad is all about keeping your organization’s data, networks, and devices safe and secure, while strengthening its security posture through strong security controls, authentication methods, and safeguards against unauthorized persons.

The model developed organically over time, with roots in early computing and papers from the 1970s and 1980s. No single person is credited with its creation.

What is the CIA Triad?

The CIA triad is widely accepted as a foundational model in information security. It’s not a singular doctrine, and there was no one author. Rather, the model appears to have developed over time, with roots as old as modern computing, pulling concepts from various sources. Ben Miller, vice president for Dragos, seems to be one of the few people who has dug into the triad’s origins. 

He wrote a blog post 11 years ago about its roots and could not find a single source. Instead, the concepts seem to be pulled from a few different documents: a 1976 paper for the U.S. Air Force, for example, and a paper written in the 1980s about the difference between commercial and military computer systems. These early explorations were crucial as the cybersecurity landscape evolved to face emerging cyber threats.

What are the Components of the CIA Triad?

When you break it down, the CIA triad is about three principles: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is all about keeping sensitive information private. Only people who are supposed to see it should be able to, and that’s where a strong authentication process like multi-factor authentication comes into play.

Think financial records, medical records, or internal business plans. These need encryption, explicit file permissions, and consistent access controls to stay safe from prying eyes and accidental leaks. Security teams often layer in data classification protocols and endpoint protections as part of a holistic approach to prevent breaches that could lead to a security incident.

Integrity

Integrity means being able to trust your data. It shouldn’t be altered without permission; you need to know it’s accurate and complete. Businesses use tools like digital signatures, backup systems, and version control to ensure critical information, from invoices to patient records, stays exactly the way it should. To maintain integrity, cybersecurity experts also implement hashing, checksums, and tamper-evident controls, helping organizations detect unauthorized changes and respond to potential threats quickly.

Availability

Just as unauthorized users must be kept out of an organization’s data, data should be available to legitimate users whenever required. This means keeping systems, networks, and devices up and running.

All of these concepts are important to security professionals. However, these three concepts are grouped into a triad so information security professionals can consider their relationship, how they overlap, and how they oppose one another. Looking at the tension between the three legs of the triad can help security professionals determine their infosec priorities and processes.

Why is the CIA Triad Important?

The CIA triad provides organizations with a clear and comprehensive checklist to evaluate their incident response plan during a cyber breach. It is especially important for navigating sources of vulnerabilities and helping discover what went wrong after a network has been compromised. From there, this information can help inform weak points, address vulnerabilities, and identify areas of strength.

What is an Example of the CIA Triad?

Think of logging into an e-commerce site to check your orders and make an additional purchase? The e-commerce site will use the three principles of the CIA triad in the following ways:

• Confidentiality: When you log in, you’re asked for a password. If it’s been a while since your last log-in, you may be asked to input a code that’s been sent to you or some other form of two-factor authentication.
• Integrity: Data integrity is provided by making sure your purchases are reflected in your account and allowing you to contact a representative if there’s a discrepancy.
• Availability: You can log into your account whenever you want, and you may even be able to contact customer support any time of the day or night. This is possible because the system relies on redundant backup systems, robust disaster recovery plans, and mitigation strategies against service or ransomware attacks that could otherwise disrupt operations.

This is just one example of how the triad can be practically applied. There are several more specific examples for each leg of the CIA stool.

For instance, examples of Confidentiality can be found in various user access control methods, like multifactor authentication, passwordless sign-on, and other access controls. Still, it’s not just about letting authorized users in. It’s also about keeping specific files inaccessible. Encryption helps organizations secure information from both accidental disclosure and malicious attacks.

Integrity can also be maintained with access control and encryption, but there are many other ways to protect data integrity, both from attacks and corruption. Sometimes, it’s as simple as a read-only file. Other times, it involves hashing or data checksums, which allow data to be audited to ensure it hasn’t been compromised. In other cases, integrity might be protected physically from outside sources that might corrupt it.

Availability is about ensuring your systems are up and running so that the business can continue, even in the face of an attack. (Note: update link) DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks rely on limited availability, for example. That’s why businesses rely on things like load balancing, backup servers, and DDoS mitigation to keep things online, even during attacks or unexpected outages. Robust security measures, including redundancy and fault tolerance, are key for ensuring business continuity. Regular employee training also plays a role here, helping staff recognize social engineering attempts that can threaten system availability.

How Can SecurityScorecard Help?

The CIA triad alone is not enough to secure your data. You also need to be aware of your risks.

SecurityScorecard can help you monitor your information security across 10 groups of risk factors with our easy-to-understand security ratings. Our ratings continuously monitor every part of your security operation.

We help protect your information security by monitoring your data and the systems and networks you have in place to protect it. We also monitor your cybersecurity by making sure your organization’s systems are patched when they need to be and that there’s no hacker chatter about your organization on the dark web. Once your score drops, you’ll know that something has changed, and our platform will then offer remediations to help you fix the problem before there’s a breach.

By aligning your approach to cybersecurity with a platform that supports internal controls and third-party assessments, you empower your security teams to take proactive steps and build resilience against unauthorized access.