CISSP Training Guide

Understanding Protection Mechanisms

Understand how the various protection mechanisms are used in information security management.

Protection mechanisms are used to enforce layers of trust between security levels of a system. Particular to operating systems, trust levels are used to provide a structured way to compartmentalize data access and create a hierarchical order. These protection mechanisms are used to protect processes and data and are discussed in the following sections:

• Layering

• Abstraction

• Data Hiding

• Encryption

Layering

Most systems use a form of layering as a way to protect system resources. A traditional kernel-based operating system, such as Unix, uses a two-layer approach in which the system resources are managed in a protected kernel ...