Management System Authentication

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Confidentiality, integrity, and availability are the cornerstones of information assurance. When coupled with the concept of authentication, these tenants provide administrators with the necessary focus to protect information systems from adversaries. If I were building a learning management system similar to WebTycho for Booz Allen, it would be critical to integrate these security goals during the development of the collaboration tool.

Confidentiality is the concept of making data available to only the people or systems that are authorized to access it (Pfleeger & Pfleeger, 2006, p. 256). In regards to a learning management system, this would require that an individual’s personal data such as grade information, communications, and activity logs are not made available to other users. Access control systems often allow administrators to integrate a level of confidentiality within an information system. More specifically, the Bell-LaPadula model is especially well known for ensuring the confidentiality of data.

The Bell-LaPadula system was proposed by David Bell and Len LaPadula in response to concerns expressed by the United States Air Force in regards to the security of its information systems (Blanton, 2010). In 1973, the engineers developed the model to focus specifically on protecting the confidentiality of data (Blanton, 2010). The Bell-LaPadula security model assigns subjects and objects within an information system a label that indicates its security classification (Balon & Thabet, 2004). Essentially, security labels are used to identify the minimum levels of security required to access resources. The Bell-LaPadula access control model follows two properties, the simple security property and the star prope...

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...wo or all three of the aforementioned authentication factors should be integrated. If the new system mirrored that of WebTycho, a simple user name/password authentication process would be sufficient.

By carefully addressing confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authentication throughout the development process of the learning management system, administrators can ensure a greater sense of security within the tool.

Works Cited

Balon, N., & Thabet, I. (2004). The Biba security model (p 1-4). The University of Michigan

Blanton, M. (2010). Computer security: Multi-level security (p 3-27). The University of Notre Dame

Pfleeger, C.P., & Pfleeger, S.L. (2006). Security in computing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Vacca, J. R. (2009). Computer and information security handbook. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

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