What are the three core goals of the CIA triad?

• A. Control, Interaction, Access; manage user permissions.
• B. Confidentiality, Integrity, Authenticity; ensure identity verification.
• C. Compliance, Insight, Authorization; ensure governance.
• D. Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability; they define security objectives ensuring data protection, trust, and service continuity.

Answer: (D)

The main idea here is the CIA triad: three goals guiding information security. Confidentiality means keeping data secret from unauthorized users, which is achieved through access controls, authentication, and encryption. Integrity is about data staying accurate and unaltered, verified via checksums, digital signatures, and proper change control. Availability ensures that authorized users can access data and systems when needed, supported by redundancy, backups, and reliable networks.

This option matches the standard triad by naming Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability and framing them as the security objectives that protect data, maintain trust, and ensure service continuity. The other choices miss one or more essential elements or substitute concepts that don’t align with the established triad: for example, authenticity emphasizes identity verification rather than keeping data accessible and reliable; governance-focused terms like compliance and authorization address policy and access control but don’t cover all three goals; and a grouping that includes vague terms rather than the actual triad terms isn’t the recognized framework.