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3.2 Infrastructure security requirements
The security needs of any business are traditionally based on risk assessment
and management. How risks are managed is a business decision based on the
business’s assessment of the risks involved in not providing various security
measures as compared to the benefit achieved by those measures. The key
point being made is that you must use multiple measures, or what we also refer
to as “layers of defense.”
The factors that influence the choice of a particular security architecture depend
mainly on the type of application the business is building and the business value
of the transactions and data that the application will support, weighed against the
cost of the security measures.
The security requirements for a business generally include:
► Access control
► Flow control
► Audit control
► Credential management
► Integrity
In the overall scheme of things, access control must be provided end-to-end in
order to support required confidentiality. The general security requirements of an
infrastructure, as well as a “best practices” infrastructure, are expected to provide
both data confidentiality and data integrity.
3.2.1 Data confidentiality assurance
In this section, we describe the following methods for providing data
confidentiality:
► Encrypt confidential and sensitive information where required.
► Facilitate both physical and logical server and network separation wherever
possible.
► Reduce exposure to network sniffing.
► Identify appropriate parties authorized to access and update content.
► Provide protection to back-end application and Web servers using network
proxy layers.
► Protect organizational resources with monitoring utilizing intrusion detection
systems (IDS).
Chapter 3. Secure infrastructure requirements 99