CCT 279: Practice CISSP Questions - Security Models (Domain 3.2)

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Dive into the complex world of security models as we unpack Domain 3.2 of the CISSP exam in this knowledge-packed episode. We begin by examining how the generative AI boom is creating significant privacy and cybersecurity challenges for organizations worldwide. Security professionals must now navigate data ownership questions, changing terms of service, and the risks of shadow AI usage – all while developing governance strategies that balance innovation with protection.

The spotlight then turns to the Chinese Wall model (Brewer-Nash), a fascinating security approach that originated in financial and legal industries. Unlike static models, this dynamic access control system creates metaphorical barriers between competing clients to prevent conflicts of interest. When a consultant accesses one company's sensitive data, they're automatically blocked from accessing a competitor's information – a concept every CISSP candidate needs to understand thoroughly.

The heart of the episode features five challenging practice questions that explore critical security models: Bell-LaPadula's simple security property for preventing unauthorized access to classified information; Clark-Wilson's transaction integrity controls for financial systems; Brewer-Nash for managing consultant access to competing clients; the Non-Interference model for preventing covert channel leaks; and the Take-Grant model for controlling rights distribution. Each question comes with detailed explanations that clarify these concepts in practical, real-world contexts.

Whether you're preparing for the CISSP exam or expanding your cybersecurity knowledge, this episode provides valuable insights into how different security models address specific protection requirements. Ready to strengthen your understanding of these essential security frameworks? Visit CISSP Cyber Training for 360 free practice questions and additional resources to support your certification journey.

Chapters

• 0:00 CISSP Podcast Introduction
• 1:11 AI Security Risks Article
• 5:24 Chinese Wall Model Explained
• 10:46 CISSP Question 1: Bell-LaPadula
• 12:47 CISSP Question 2-5: Security Models
• 18:21 Episode Closing and Resources

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the CISSP Cyber Training Podcast, where we provide you the training and tools you need to pass the CISSP exam the first time. Hi, my name is Sean Gerber and I'm your host for this action-packed, informative podcast. Join me each week as I provide the information you need to pass the CISSP exam and grow your cybersecurity knowledge. All right, let's get started. Let's go.

Speaker 2: 0:24

Let's go. Cybersecurity knowledge. All right, let's get started. Good morning everyone. It's Sean Gerber with CISSP Cyber Training and hope you all are having a beautifully blessed day today.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Today is CISSP Question Thursday and we are putting together questions that are aligned specifically with the CISSP topic that we talked about on Monday and this today we're going to be talking about domain 3.2. And that's the main focus specifically around the different various security models. But before we do, we had a quick article I wanted to bring to your attention, and then I also had a little bit of training that I wanted to add at the beginning based on some more research I had done as I was going through some of the questions. But before we get into that, there's the article and this is an interesting part when I'm working with my partners at NextPeak is how the generative AI boom opens up new privacy and cybersecurity risks. So I don't know if you all are seeing the AI air quotes boom that's occurring right now and it's a pretty substantial thing that's affecting a lot of different companies and the point of it comes down to is is that if you are not a CISO that is planning for this and you're having a good understanding of how this is all going to play out, or just a cybersecurity person in general, you're going to run into some problems and we've been talking about this at NextPeak and with other partners that I have in other areas of cybersecurity that the AI, privacy and risks that are associated with it, along with others that have individuals using AI within their workplace, is going to come to a nexus at some point. So the article is from CSO Magazine and it talks about how it's going to be affecting this and they talk about it that you're going to have to have a strategy as a security professional to deal with the potential issues from the account from both shielding who owns the data and preventing AI from becoming a security breach, and we talk about this a lot in the CISSP.

Speaker 2: 2:10

Cyber training is data ownership and who owns the specific data and who is controlling the data, and you're really going to have to define that. And one of my partners at NXP, byron he made a comment about making sure that the data itself has proper ownership, but how it is being properly classified from a business standpoint. So I do agree completely with that. Now the article gets into different aspects around your changing of the terms of service, so how it's being used. You're going to need to keep tabs on that from a terms of service of using AI, tabs on that from a terms of service of using AI that perform. Platforms such as WeTransfer, slack and others are basically increasingly claiming rights to user data for AI training. So if you have individuals that are using this, they're collecting the data and they're using it. They're saying, hey, now we own this data, so this kind of can cause some concerns with the company. So you need to make sure you, as an individual and a security professional, are working with your legal teams to understand the terms of service on each of these. It's really a pretty big deal.

Speaker 2: 3:13

Shadow AI in the workplace Employees are using things like ChatGPT much more frequently for work tasks without approval, and I saw this before I left Koch Industries. That is a big big deal. Right, we were putting a pretty big kibosh on it and trying to control what was happening with the data, but when it comes right down to, a lot of companies are not controlling that data. They are not doing it at all and therefore they're just letting their people put the stuff out there and we don't know what's happening with the information, and a lot of it can be very proprietary or sensitive, so need to really have a good handle on that.

Speaker 2: 3:47

Privacy and security risks. The AI platform basically ingests large amounts of data which can be exploited if a breach were to occur. So you need to make sure that you understand that and users' errors, such as making charts, publications and other areas available to chat GPT can actually increase your confidential information out there, and so, as a security professional, you must balance basically enabling AI adoption with ensuring security and ethical use. You need to reach out to companies that can help you with this risk assessments and understanding the overall risk to your organization. Nextpeak, one of the partners that I'm with, can help you with that specific situation. You may want to look at it and just kind of consider what is your exposure from a business standpoint, and then, basically, the key takeaway from all this article is organizations will need to have a clear AI governance terms plan and then review the terms of service, restrict, shadow IT and train your employees, and these are kind of the things we've been talking about with CISP for quite some time that you're going to need to make sure that you have your people trained, you understand the risk to your organization and you do truly understand the terms of service that you're getting yourself into when it comes to some of these different types of platforms that are out there. So, again, this is from CSO. It's how generative AI boom opens up new privacy and cybersecurity risks.

Speaker 2: 5:09

Okay, so let's get into some a little bit of training. I want to start before we get into the questions. I've got five very important questions that are going to kind of help challenge your thought process around the domain 3.2 and then maybe help educate youa little bit on that as well. So let's get started. Okay, so one of the questions that came up that I've actually seen people talk about is and I mentioned it in the last in the episode for training is the Chinese wall model, and this deals with Brewer and Nash. So what exactly is the Chinese wall model? So let's just kind of get into that a little bit and then we'll get into the questions. So the term Chinese wall comes from the financial and legal industries and it basically comes down to they want to create a barrier between ethical and information, and this is basically set up inside the organization, such as investment banks, law firms and so forth, and it's to help prevent conflicts of interest between the two. So we talked about this a little bit, of this example in the training on Monday.

Speaker 2: 6:06

But the One of the things is. An example would be as an investment banker is advising company A on a merger and they must not access information about company B if the firm is advising them right, because that could cause unfair advantage between the two companies. We mentioned the same kind of concept between having your consultant working in two different companies. So you're trying to create this wall between the two so that there isn't information shared between them to prevent conflicts of interest. And the purpose of conflicts of interest to avoid that is to create trust in this overall model. So the security model connection and how this plays out is a Brewer-Nash model which was created in 1989, formalizes into an access control model and it prevents the subject, basically the user, the consultant, analyst, whoever that might be, who has access to the sensitive data about one client or organization, from later accessing sensitive data about a competing client. So again, the differences between the static classification of the Bellapula, the BIBA, is that this is dynamic. This happens, the decisions may have happened. At one point you know you were a consultant doing something and then you're a consultant on a competitor in the future. This is designed to help understand, create that wall of segregation between what you did in the past and what you're doing right now.

Speaker 2: 7:22

So in financial firms, the reason the chinese wall comes up is that it's a financial firms. The wall is a metaphorical barrier separating the departments or the clients, right? That's the ultimate point of this. You can call the Chinese wall, you can call it the walled garden, you can call it whatever you want to call it. The ultimate goal is that if you're on one side of the wall, you're blocked from accessing information of the other. So once you cross the wall to go to one side, you cannot access the information on the other side.

Speaker 2: 7:49

Now, that doesn't mean you haven't used some of the stuff in your brain, but you don't want to be able to use data from one side to the next, and that's again that's something they're trying to break down and not have to have any sort of conflicts of interest.

Speaker 2: 8:00

So an example a kind of a real world example would be is a consulting firm is advising Coca-Cola, right?

Speaker 2: 8:06

Or Pepsi? Well, we're going to get into Pepsi here in a minute, but anything, I'm just picking Coke as an example, one consultant accesses Coke's database, brewer Nash model blocks them from accessing Pepsi's database to avoid conflict of interest. So again, same concept you could still work on Ford or Chevy or whatever, because they're not a competitor in the same conflict class. So that's the ultimate point is that you can work on different items, but you can't have both in the same financial institution. Now where it would get kind of potentially squishy is is if you were Coca-Cola and you were then working on as a consultant with information that maybe feeds products or some sort of chemical not chemicals, what's the right word a supply chain that goes into Pepsi's products that maybe would be similar between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Then it can get a little squishy. But the bottom line of it is that you're trying to break this up so that you don't have an unfair advantage in relating to the different types of capabilities.

Speaker 2: 9:05

Unlike our congressmen in the US government, where they have all kinds of insider trading and they can make millions just because they're there. That's a different topic and, yes, that is way off topic of security, but it's very true because, if you look at it from a government standpoint, they have access to a lot of information that allows them to make trades on their behalf and, as such, they make a lot of money where the rest of us don't have that same information and, as such, they make a lot of money where the rest of us don't have that same information. So the goal is again creating a walled garden between the fact that what the information you have access to and the information you can actually act upon. So same kind of concept, sort of sort of. All right, so let's get into some of the questions we're going to talk about today. Ok, so you can get all of this at CISSP Cyber Training. Again, plug for me. I've got to put that out there because, again, it's CISSP Cyber Training.

Speaker 2: 9:54

The products out there are out there because we provide the content and the platform for you. So, again, go check it out. There's a lot of free stuff there. There's also some paid stuff which pays for the platform. So if you see anything out there that you need, go for it, look at it, see what you can do with it. I have basically the basic version, which can get you all the free content that you need Not a big deal. It's all free and available to you. Just got to give me your email address and then you can have access to it. This is from my deep dive stuff that I have available for going over every single of the domains to include free CISSP questions. It's all there and available to you free. If you want more deep dive, you want to get access to the videos? You want access to the content, both audio and video. If you want access to me, because there's a mentoring that's involved with that, go check out what I've got to offer at the CISSP Cyber Training as well.

Speaker 1: 10:44

So there's the paid products and the free stuff.

Speaker 2: 10:46

So let's roll into what we're going to talk about today with these five deep dive questions focused on domain 3.2. Okay, question one A defense contractor is building a system to handle documents classified as top secret, secret and confidential. The company is most concerned that users with lower clearances should never be able to read information above their clearance level. Which security model best enforces this requirement? A the property of the star property of Bell Laputa. B the simple security property of the Bell Laputa. C the integrity axiom of BIBA or D the strong tranquility principle. Okay, which one is it? Well, you might be going okay, well, what is the strong tranquility principle? Never, ever talked about that. Well, the strong tranquility principle basically says that security labels do not change during the system's operation, which is not really any concern on the situation. So it wouldn't be one that you would want. The axiom of BIBA right, that sounds kind of like a movie. Biba's integrity axiom is about basically no read down and no write up for integrity, not specifically for confidentiality, and we are concerned about confidentiality. So, when it comes down to it is that the overall simple security property is the best one. It's the no read up and it's basically a subject at a lower clearance cannot read objects at a higher classification level. So again, it's different than the BIBA's integrity axiom, which is no read down. This is where you have no read up and this one directly applies to this specific situation, because the clearances you don't want to be able to read from a secret to a top secret.

Speaker 2: 12:27

Question two a bank is designing a transaction processing system. The goal is to ensure only well-formed transactions are executed, to prevent unauthorized users from manipulating account balances and enforcing separation of duties between employees. Again, separation of duties is SOD. Which model best addresses these concerns? A the Biba model, b the Clark-Wilson model, c the Bellaputa model or D the Brewer-Nash Chinese wall model. The answer is B, the Clark-Wilson model. Now, the Clark-Wilson model enforces well-formed transactions, separation of duties and certification rules. This is what you want for financial systems, ideally. But the BIBA is focused on integrity, which is basically no read down, no write up, but does not enforce separation of duties or well-formed transactions. And then the Bellaputa is obviously for confidentiality, not integrity of business rules. And then the Brewer of Nash we talked about the Chinese wall. Parts of this is it prevents conflicts of interest such as consulting and investment. So this one really doesn't fit the overall piece around separation of duties in this case. So it's focused around conflicts of interest. So the answer is Clark Wilson.

Speaker 2: 13:37

Question three a research firm hires consultants who may work with multiple clients in the same industry. Oh, I wonder what that one is. The company must prevent consultants from accessing data on competing clients once they begin working on one client's project. Which security model should be applied? Okay, we just kind of talked about this one. So which one is it? Hmm, things that make you go. Hmm Well, let's see, the Clark Wilson is A, bell Laputa is B, the Brewer Nash is C and the Harrison Rousseau Ullman is D. So HRU is theoretically a model about rights assignment. So we know that that one is probably not it at all, because it's about revocation, not conflict of interest. Bell Laputa enforces confidentiality, but again, it's not client-based conflicts which we've talked about. And then the Clark-Wilson is a transaction integrity-focused only and it's not for dynamic conflicts that may be occurring. So the answer would be yes, it would be C, the Brewer-Nash Chinese wall model. We talked about this. You're client A, you're a consultant working on client a you do not have access to, and then you begin to work for client b at a future point, you do not have access to back to client a's information again. That's to prevent conflicts of interest.

Speaker 2: 14:49

Question five a military system is required to ensure that actions at the top secret level do not have any observable effect on the processes at the confidential or unclassified levels, even indirectly. Which model best enforces this? Okay, so A the BIBA, b the Graham-Denning, c the Bellaputa and D the non-interference model. Okay, so which one best enforces this? So the BIBA, let's talk about it. It protects integrity and it's not information flow between the high and low levels, which is what top secret and secret are, or top secret and confidential. Biba protects integrity, not information flow between the high and low levels. We talked about that. Graham Denning defines the rights and operations for the object slash, subject management, but does not prevent covert leakage. And then Bellaputa enforces no read-up and no write-down but doesn't fully prevent obviously subtle interference between these covert channels. So which is the right answer? The right answer is the non-interference one. This is where it ensures higher-level actions do not influence lower-level states, preventing obviously covert channel leaks between the two. And we've talked about covert channel leaks in various aspects of the CISSP, cyber training. So if you want to go back to a previous episode, you can go and check that out.

Speaker 2: 16:10

Question five a cloud provider must design a system that ensures creation, deletion and transfer of rights between users and objects is strictly controlled Say transfer. So anything deletion, transfer, any of those things are strictly controlled of rights between users and objects is strictly controlled Say transfer, okay, so anything deletion, transfer, any of those things are strictly controlled. Of rights right, the model should specify how subjects can be created and how their rights are transferred. Which model best addresses this need? Okay, so we're dealing with rights. So we have A the Tate-Grant model, b the Bibba model, c the Bellapula model, or D the Brewer-Nash model? Okay, so, based on what we've talked about, the Brewer-Nash model is a Chinese wall.

Speaker 2: 16:48

This one does not affect anything that deals with rights. It's focused specifically around conflicts of interest. So you could throw that one away. Bellaputa enforces confidentiality rules and is not defined around rights distribution. The Biba model is around integrity but not around rights transfer. So which one is left? It is the take-grant model because it specifically talks about taking and granting rights, air quotes of objects. So you know that if you're dealing with rights or you're taking it and you're granting rights, then it is ideal for modeling rights distribution and therefore that would be the most correct answer. So, again, take, grant is around rights, so I hope that kind of helped around those areas. Okay, that's all I've got for you today.

Speaker 2: 17:31

Head on over to CISSP Cyber Training. You can get access to these questions, as well as many, many more. I've got over a thousand different CISSP questions that are out there and available for you. They're all out there at CISSP Cyber Training. Go check it out. It's an awesome site. We are just. Things are growing very quickly at CISSP Cyber Training. We have lots and lots of great content and we are helping a lot of people be successful at the CISSP. So go check it out, see what you think. Let me know if you have any questions. No-transcript. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes, as I would greatly appreciate your feedback. Also, check out my videos that are on YouTube and just head to my channel at CISSP Cyber Training and you will find a plethora, or a cornucopia, of content to help you pass the CISSP exam the first time. Content to help you pass the CISSP exam the first time. Lastly, head to CISSP Cyber Training and sign up for 360 free CISSP questions to help you in your CISSP journey. Thanks again for listening.