Principles of data security

This section discusses the three principles of data security, namely confidentiality, integrity, and availability, usually called the CIA. Any piece of data stored on the device or server should meet these three attributes for security. Understanding these benchmarks will help us evaluate how secure our data storage solution is. All these three principles are usually expressed as a CIA triad.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is the first pillar of security and it focuses on privacy of data. This principle ensures that private data stays away from prying eyes and is only available to users with appropriate access rights. For example, the private data of an Android application should only be accessible to that application's components or other components with appropriate permission (in case the data is protected using permissions). The Linux operating system sandbox and permissions enforces this confidentiality. In another case, an encrypted file containing sensitive...