Protection goals of information security

In short: Information security protects data and systems based on three basic goals: confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA).

In more detail: Confidentiality: only authorised persons may see information. Integrity: data stays correct and unaltered. Availability: systems and data are usable when needed. In addition, authenticity and non-repudiation are named.

In Depth

Goal	Threat	Measure
Confidentiality	eavesdropping, theft	encryption, access rights
Integrity	manipulation	hashes, signatures, checksums
Availability	outage, DDoS	backup, redundancy, updates

• Protection requirement assessment: Data is classified by damage on violation as normal, high or very high (per BSI baseline protection).
• Measures: technical (firewall, encryption), organisational (policies, training), personnel, structural.
• Risk: probability of occurrence × amount of damage.
• Example: customer database: high protection need for confidentiality, medium for availability.

See also: Digital signature, Backup strategy (3-2-1 rule), BSI Act