The CIA triad is like the blueprint for locking down any digital system you rely on your email, your bank’s app, even your campus Wi-Fi. Picture a mission control readying a spaceship, you need three checks before launch.

Confidentiality is the art of keeping information hidden from anyone without the proper clearance. Technically, this starts with encryption algorithms like AES-256, which scramble data into ciphertext using a secret key.

Integrity assures you that data arrives exactly as it was sent, untouched by malicious actors or inadvertent errors. At its core are cryptographic hash functions like SHA-256 or SHA-3 that compute a fixed size fingerprint for any input.

Availability ensures that users and applications can access data and services exactly when needed. The foundation here is redundancy duplicating critical components so there’s no single point of failure.