A note on IT Integrity and authority

I posted an article that had taken a long time to get approval for on my employer’s blog, Information Integrity, the final frontier. I argue that the business has not taken integrity as seriously as it has availability and confidentiality. In the blog, I state that,

Information integrity requires an accurate representation of the state of the business and the audit records as to how it got there. Modern systems need to record both; it’s not enough that the system is provably accurate, records are required to ensure that transactions and changes are appropriately authorised.

The key insight is that not only must the true state of the data be recorded but that the person verify this truth must be recorded.

The article talks about strong “Requirements Management” and good “Testing” processes, and then talks about the use of PKI to sign application to application feeds or transactions to guarantee to the system of record that the author is a permitted actor and that the delivered data is accurate and authorised. I also propose that application logs as proposed under the “Application Security” domain of ISO/IEC 27034 should be used to record the authority/author of a database update.

ooOOOoo

Given the startling longevity of this blog, I have made a mirror of the Citihub article and loaded it to this site; integrity: the final frontier, a mirror …