Access Controls

Access Controls

Who has any kind of access to your organization’s data infrastructure? How does the organization ensure that individuals who attempt to gain any sort of access to the internal systems have actually been granted that access? Under which circumstances will the organization deny user access to individuals who have access privileges? To effectively protect the businesses data, the organization must ensure that they have implemented the use of access controls. Which will then be used in addressing the above-listed questions. What follows next is the fundamentals of access control. What is generally entails, its importance, application within an organization, and the various challenges which security professionals are faced within its configuration.

Access control can be understood as a method of warranting that users wishing to gain access to a network or information infrastructure are who they say they are and have the appropriate and required access to the organizations stored data (Putra, 2019). At a much higher level, access control is simply the discriminatory constraint of access to an organizations data. Where it mainly consists of two major components, the authorization and authentication processes. Authentication is the fundamental technique used in individual verification against their credentials. However, authentication alone is not sufficient to adequately protect the organization’s data.

What is required is an additional layer of authorization, which is used to determine whether or not an individual’s access request should be denied or allowed. Facilitating them to conduct the business transaction with which they are attempting. Therefore, without the proper installation of the authorization and authentication process, there is no adequate data security. In every recorded data breach, the very first security protocol, which is investigated is the access controls.

Currently, with the increased rate of online transactions, ecommerce businesses, credit service providers are increasingly adopting this technology. In the quest to ensure that their companies and services continue to remain relevant with the innovative technologies being introduced. However, not all of these businesses are fully implementing the required security controls to ensure the safety and security of their user’s personal data in the occurrence of a data breach.

Whether it be an unplanned exposure of delicate data which was indecorously secured by an end-user, such as the case in the Equifax breach, where volumes of sensitive data were uncovered through the businesses web server which had an unknown vulnerability, access controls are a key component. In such cases where the access controls are not correctly configured, implemented or maintained, the resulting effects can be very catastrophic (Sindiren, 2019). Such is the case for business which employs the use of sale cards payment systems; security should always be a priority.

This is more so for all organizations which provide their services online and allow for their employees or customers to connect to the internet – which is virtually every organization in today’s business era – require some additional level of access controls set in place.  We are all aware of a point of sale system (POS), even though we may not realize and figure out the technology immediately. It’s the combination of hardware and software solutions which is crucial to retail business for them to conduct their activities.

From simple activities such as the management of inventory and user’s ordering goods to the more sophisticated activities of processing the transactions, and management of staff members and customers. The point of sale system is considered as the central hub, which is fundamental for the retailers to increase their performance and overall growth. POS systems have enabled almost every individual from artisans to the savvy business entrepreneurs who have a vision of turning their passion into their livelihood and profession to open and grow their retail stores. However, its is critical for them to ensure that they put in place both logical and physical access control systems to their point of sale payment systems as a measure of protecting their merchants and customers against fraudulent activities.

Physical access controls are the mechanical form of access controls. They can also be considered as a room with a key to the entire businesses network and information infrastructure. in most cases when physical access is designed to be managed with the use of software, the chip installed on the access cards, alongside an electronically controlled lock allows users access to the infrastructure with the use of the software, which is often considered as a logical access control unit. That being said, card systems are recommended to add an additional security layer, often in the form of biometrics, to ensure adequate security and provide access.

When such systems incorporating logical access controls are properly adopted and maintained, with the respective set of policies accompanying the system and used in governing their use is followed to the letter, the system can prove to be very difficult to defeat. In many cases, the physical access control is designed to serve the purpose and act as the front end of the logical access control system where the logical access controls are designed to be security protocols which allow for validation, checking accountability and authorization of user credentials in the business infrastructure, as well as the information systems within the business environment.

In a POS card system, these components are vital for enforcing access control measures for the entire system, its information, processes and applicable applications (Peng, 2020). The logical access controls can also be easily embedded inside an operating system, infrastructure administrative system and applications. Once users’ credentials have been authenticated and authorized, it is the responsibility of the logical access controls to either allow or prevent access to the business resources. Furthermore, once a user is logged in, as pre-configured in the logical access controls, they are allowed access only to the resources in which they have clearance to get or require to perform their respective duties.

Most logical access controls use, as a security measure, the technology of tokenization. When dealing with data security, tokenization is regarded as the process by which access control systems substitute a sensitive and critical data element with another element which is equivalent but non-sensitive, which is referred to as the token, often with no exploitable or extrinsic value or meaning. With the use of the tokenization system, the token can map back to the more sensitive data.

References

Putra, G. D., Dedeoglu, V., Kanhere, S. S., & Jurdak, R. (2019). Trust Management in Decentralized IoT Access Control System. arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.10247.

Sindiren, E., & Ciylan, B. (2019). Application model for privileged account access control system in enterprise networks. Computers & Security, 83, 52-67.

He, Z., Peng, L., Xu, M., Wang, G., Yu, H., & Hou, Z. (2020). Research on Dynamic Security Access Control Technology Based on Resource Attributes. In Recent Trends in Intelligent Computing, Communication and Devices (pp. 927-933). Springer, Singapore.