Types of Security Policies

Each site has its own requirements for the levels of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and the site policy states these needs for that particular site.

A military security policy (also called a governmental security policy) is a security policy developed primarily to provide confidentiality.

The name comes from the military's need to keep information, such as the date that a troop ship will sail, secret. Although integrity and availability are important, organizations using this class of policies can overcome the loss of eitherfor example, by using orders not sent through a computer network. But the compromise of confidentiality would be catastrophic, because an opponent would be able to plan countermeasures (and the organization may not know of the compromise).

Confidentiality is one of the factors of privacy, an issue recognized in the laws of many government entities (such as the Privacy Act of the United States and similar legislation in Sweden). Aside from constraining what information a government entity can legally obtain from individuals, such acts place constraints on the disclosure and use of that information. Unauthorized disclosure can result in penalties that include jail or fines; also, such disclosure undermines the authority and respect that individuals have for the government and inhibits them from disclosing that type of information to the agencies so compromised.

A commercial security policy is a security policy developed primarily to provide integrity.

The name comes from the need of commercial firms to prevent tampering with their data, because they could not survive such compromises. For example, if the confidentiality of a bank's computer is compromised, a customer's account balance may be revealed. This would certainly embarrass the bank and possibly cause the customer to take her business elsewhere. But the loss to the bank's "bottom line" would be minor. However, if the integrity of the computer holding the accounts were compromised, the balances in the customers' accounts could be altered, with financially ruinous effects.

Some integrity policies use the notion of a transaction; like database specifications, they require that actions occur in such a way as to leave the database in a consistent state. These policies, called transaction-oriented integrity security policies, are critical to organizations that require consistency of databases

The role of trust in these policies highlights their difference. Confidentiality policies place no trust in objects; so far as the policy is concerned, the object could be a factually correct report or a tale taken from Aesop's Fables. The policy statement dictates whether that object can be disclosed. It says nothing about whether the object should be believed.

Integrity policies, to the contrary, indicate how much the object can be trusted. Given that this level of trust is correct, the policy dictates what a subject can do with that object. But the crucial question is how the level of trust is assigned. For example, if a site obtains a new version of a program, should that program have high integrity (that is, the site trusts the new version of that program) or low integrity (that is, the site does not yet trust the new program), or should the level of trust be somewhere in between (because the vendor supplied the program, but it has not been tested at the local site as thoroughly as the old version)? This makes integrity policies considerably more nebulous than confidentiality policies. The assignment of a level of confidentiality is based on what the classifier wants others to know, but the assignment of a level of integrity is based on what the classifier subjectively believes to be true about the trustworthiness of the information.

Two other terms describe policies related to security needs; because they appear elsewhere, we define them now.

A confidentiality policy is a security policy dealing only with confidentiality.

An integrity policy is a security policy dealing only with integrity.

Both confidentiality policies and military policies deal with confidentiality; however, a confidentiality policy does not deal with integrity at all, whereas a military policy may. A similar distinction holds for integrity policies and commercial policies.