Access
We have thus far concentrated only on the specific ideas of ensuring that a user is who they say they are and that only the correct users can view and use data. However, once we have taken the appropriate steps and confirmed these details, we still need to ensure that this data is secure when the user is actually using it; there are a number of areas to consider:
- Is the user allowed to see all of the information in the data? Perhaps they are to be limited to certain rows, or even certain parts of certain rows.
- Is the data secure when the user runs analytics across it? We need to ensure that the data isn't transmitted as plain text and therefore open to man-in-the-middle attacks.
- Is the data secure once the user has completed their task? There's no point in ensuring that the data is super secure at all stages, only to write plain text results to an insecure area.
- Can conclusions be made from the aggregation of data? Even if the user only has access to certain rows of a dataset...
