Physical Security

The Physical Side of Security

Often when we talk about cyber security, we're thinking of those bits that are flying back and forth. We're thinking of a hacker hacking into our network, and we're thinking of the different equipment like firewalls and software that we implement to protect that network. But often we overlook physical security. There's a physical part of our equipment and our network that we need to protect as well.

In lessons leading up to this, we talked a lot about security: how to architect our network, devices that we would set up, where to set those devices up, how to harden those devices, how to harden all the devices on our network, how to configure our network. We've talked a lot about security, but one thing we haven't addressed too much yet is the physical side of this. Because if we have everything set up correctly from a security standpoint but overlook the physical side of things, we can have issues that would bring these services down or possibly compromise the traffic that's going across these networks. So we need to gain some sort of understanding around physical security and how we can architect towards that.

Physical Threats

Here again, we're looking for things that could affect confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

There are things that can happen to hardware. Things can be dropped. Things could be intentionally or unintentionally broken. We could have some sort of water damage. There are also threats like temperature, fire, and just high humidity that can cause problems on our equipment.

We also have electrical threats, things like power spikes or insufficient power — we call those brownouts. We could have unconditioned power; that means that there's just a lot of static, there's a lot of noise on that power that causes problems. Or flat-out power outages, and we call those blackouts.

Physical Access Management

We've talked about some physical aspects and some physical security, especially when it comes to availability and how we want to set up redundancy and possibly multiple sites, but we haven't addressed all of our needs from a physical standpoint. There's still confidentiality, integrity, and some things that we have not talked about from an availability standpoint.

Much of this revolves around access management. We have talked quite a bit about access management, but we haven't addressed the physical access, because we need this equipment to remain secure. So how do we put these in locations that are secure locations, that are not going to be compromised?

That leaves physical access and how we can control physical access to our different infrastructures, to our different facilities, to the different network rooms that we have, to the different equipment that we have, and making sure that we maintain some sort of control over the access of those.