Recapitulating the development initiatives of a robust information security safeguard: RITSB-the proposed solution

IOSR Journal of Computer Engineering (IOSR-JCE)
e-ISSN: 2278-0661, p- ISSN: 2278-8727Volume 15, Issue 2 (Nov. - Dec. 2013), PP 30-34
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Recapitulating the development initiatives of a robust information
security safeguard: RITSB-the proposed solution
Jahidul Arafat1
and Md. Ahsan Habib2
1
Researcher, HT Research and Consultancy, UK.
2
Department of Information and Communication Technology, Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology
University, Bangladesh
Abstract: Most current information security systems performance vary with the nature of the filed its being
operating. With an increased emphasizes on the adoption of security tools and technologies, the anomalies and
intrusion are mostly said defined to be detected on system's algorithm, when most systems have well defined
mechanism for rapid reaction and identification of intrusions. However, despite this support for anomaly
detection, this is usually limited and often require a full recompilation of the system to deploy a comprehensive
framework of security governance, strategies and practices employing the policies in implementation.
As a result, the absence of a robust security framework securing both the education and corporate
resources has heightened the tension for a strategic information security solutions which might ends with cost,
complexities and cumbersome to develop. This paper thereby presents an alternative comprehensive system
namely RITS-B which accommodates both the nature of education and organizations without a need to for a
further modification. Implication of the proposed approach at real time depicts its suitability in the arena of
concern.
Keywords: Information Security, Governance, Strategies, Practices, Regional Cultures and Believes.
I. Introduction
Information technology security in higher education is the process of securing the higher education
environment without disrupting the openness, accessibility, academic and intellectual freedom which is at the
very heart of the higher education environment. It is one of the fundamental process towards the broader
security because the further processing steps depends of what types of security breaches has been occurred and
what strategies are in place to cope up with these. Despite the numerous functionality of security, IT security in
Higher education is still a subject of on-going investment and it cannot be conclusively stated that education
field is highly secured because of the application, technological and intrusion’s diversity. As a consequence, the
task of choosing the best method which will not only ensure mission critical level security to each bit of higher
education information but also not compromise with its core missions is still a difficult challenge.
1.1 Structure of the study
This paper is organized as follows: the literature review related to the basic idea on higher education
and corporate level IT security needs and various hard and soft aspects of security to secure their arena including
their advantages and disadvantages is detailed in section 2. The RITS-B approach is presented in section 3. The
quantitative survey results are provided in section 4 and finally section 5 shows some concluding remarks.
II. Literature Review
2.1 What if information security?
By far the most commonly used meaning for information security is the preservation of (Dark et al,
2006; Voloudakis & King, 2003; Ward & Hawkins, 2003):
a) Confidentiality or protection from unauthorized use or disclosure of information.
b) Integrity, ensuring data accuracy and completeness through protection from unauthorized, unanticipated, or
unintentional modification, and including authenticity.
c) Availability, making data available to the authorized users on a timely basis and when needed and
d) Scalability, scaling the belief of educational culture of one region from that of other regions and stimulate
institution’s interest to contribute in the field of information security concerns while preserving oaths and
mandates of learning and knowledge sharing.
Thus the study can, in turn, characterize each of these seven protection categories: confidentiality,
integrity, authenticity, scalability, non-repudiation, accountability, and availability-by levels of sensitivity: high
(serious injury to an institution), medium (serious injury), and low (minor injury).

Recapitulating the development initiatives of a robust information security safeguard: RITSB-the
2.2 Hard and Soft Information security solutions
Several survey papers (Arabasz & Pirani, 2002; Kvavik & Voloudakis, 2003; Yanosky & Salaway, 2006)
cover the major Information Technology Security Approaches available in the literature. Most of the security
schemes can be roughly categorized into two approaches:
 The Hard i.e. Technical Method
 The Soft i.e. Non-Technical Method
Basically, the first approach explores the information security technologies used by the higher education
institutions. What tools have they chosen to install, to prevent harm to their information assets? The security
levels are then deduced from the boundary of these installed high functional tools. The usual tools that are
employed in hard methods include antivirus software, SSL for web transactions, centralized data backup,
network firewall, enterprise directory, VPN for remote access, intrusion detection and prevention tools,
encryption, content monitoring/filtering, electronic signature and shibboleth. The first approach fails to gain
total effectiveness in the higher education information security process due to the following reasons: (a) Money
matters when developing IT security strategies but much depends on how, when and where it is used, by whom
and with what level of effort and skill. (b) Integrating adopted technologies with current and future practices is
the lion’s share then just that of selecting it. (c) And peoples’ troubles in understanding the adopted technologies
(Yanosky & Salaway, 2006).
The strategies for the second approach exploit the importance of soft IT interventions (e.g.
organization, Cultural aspects, awareness program, training programs, policies, executive attention etc.) to
produce a secured campus environment around the educational institution and having the advantages such as: (a)
It is very simple in nature (b) It evaluates all the spatial properties of Information security. (c) Representation of
security pattern is much more effective and well structured than only technology based security processing. (d)
It gives dynamic and formalized solution to security concerns. (e) It is based on the belief that openness and
accessibility of higher education environment will not only be preserved but also be secured. The features of this
approach provide well organized security solution with some limitations on concerns and generalization because
of academic and departmental diversities.
2.3 Robust information security solution: rational to have
These hints are significant for higher education, where much information used for teaching and
research requires the highest level of integrity and availability but low level of confidentiality and for Muslim
nation flexible sense of scalability also need to be defined. And to ensure such level an institution have two
choices: either to follow the security approach (a) or (b) as mentioned in section I or go for the use of a blended
approach- balancing the features of (a) and (b) according to its academia’s believes, needs and constrains to
foster the institution’s security goal. Where this balancing scheme requires the exploration of the following
issues (Bellovin et al, 2006; Albrecht & Caruso, 2003; Pirani, Sheep Pond Associates, Voloudakis, Ernst &
Young, 2003):
1. Make IT security a priority.
2. Selecting security controls and products.
3. Defining and empowering acceptable behavior [by students, faculty, and staff].
4. Preserve the academia’s religion, regional and cultural believes.
5. Revise instructional security policy and improve the use of existing security tools.
6. Making consistent, timely, and cost-effective management decisions.
7. Improve security for further research and education networks.
8. Integrate work in higher education with national effort to strengthen critical infrastructure and
9. Empowering [members of the institution’s community to do their work] securely.
All these are the pledge of the education and organization to gain success in openness and privacy in the field of
information security.
III. Development initiatives of robust information security solution
To improve the security scheme, a strategy consists in combining these approaches in order to obtain a
robust security by exploiting the advantages of one method to overcome the limitations of the other one called
Robust IT Security Balancing (RITS-B) Approach is presented in this paper. This is an attempt to unify different
methods of higher education information security approaches under a common topology based on the both hard
and soft interventions with that of Muslim culture and believes. This RITS-B Approach considers all the soft
aspects of information security i.e. information security Policies, Awareness, Leadership and Practices for the

user community on the acceptable use of technological tools to develop such strategic framework of security
environment where facts, national and religion perspectives will be merged up to lead to a proactive leadership
and information security system without violating the freedom and openness that is at the very heart of the
academia. In the RITS-B approach, soft security aspects are used not to describe which contents should they have
rather what should be the status of these in place security aspects and what characteristics should they bare for the
acceptable use of the existing security tools and technologies to the campus community and thereby to secure
their information arena.
3.1 The RITS-B : The Proposed Approach
The proposed RITS-B approach is detailed in Roadmap 1. It consists of nine (09) steps those were
grouped into three basic modules as discussed in section A, B and C to achieve the sustainability in the process
of higher education secrecy and security for Muslim nations. An institution is defined by its value criterion as
discussed above where its security challenges lies on its scope and scale- to assess the security concerns. The
heterogeneous and diverse nature of institution and academia fuel the further processing needs of security in the
domain of technology and generic soft interventions that is presented in section B and section C respectively. If
the institutions are in the need of security then put the above mentioned nine steps under the same umbrella of
secrecy where the institution’s cultures, believes and values shows the further light towards the journey on
robust security and sustainability in this complicated and insecure world environment.
Roadmap 01: Robust IT Security Balancing (RITS-B) Approach
Precondition: Institutions to be secured
Post condition: A more secured higher education environment
1. Define the institution’s information security scope
a. Develop a framework on fact and national perspective for campus security
b. Identify security policies, tools, procedure and practices
2. Defining IT Security Strategic Assessment Scale
a. Reactive
b. Technology Centric
c. Cultural
d. Fortified
3. Document the institution’s technological needs
a. Technology/Tools vary
i. with that of application and intrusions
ii. with that of institutions wants, needs and abilities
b. Main purpose: is to fulfill the requirements of (1) to (9) of section II
4. Model the Management System Information Security on campus
a. Based on: DI-AI methodology
b. Should follow the standards of NBR ISO/IEC-27001:2005
5. Model Information Security Organizational Structure
a. Formulate a centralized office
b. Decentralize it into ITPO and ITSO
c. Have some dedicated staffs
6. Development of security plans and policies
7. Communication and awareness
8. Model the pattern of institutional IT Security Practices
9. Implementation of security Easy to Use Scheme
IV. RITS-B implication at education and corporate level
In analyzing the security performance of the RITS-B approach, the responses of 6 senior university
administrators- the majority of whom were Chief IT Officer and other director of CICT (Centre of Information
and Communication Technology) /academic/administrative computing along with 66 academic personnel at 6
engineering institutions of Bangladesh were synthesized, from a June 2010 survey as reported in Information
Technology Security Management in Engineering Universities in Bangladesh by Jahidul Arafat, Lecturer,
Research Associate, HTRC, UK. The existing security trends of these institutions were queried by the respective
researcher and in the light of the findings the RITS-B approach is developed and later the surveyed institutions
were asked to implement this newly developed security scheme in their arena. The impact of the implementation
status of this RITS-B approach at those institutions were further analyzed against three survey questions to

assess respondents’ opinions on the success of their IT security outcomes (Likert scale ranging from: 1=
strongly agree, 2= agree, 3= Disagree, and 4= Strongly Disagree):
 How would you characterize your program success?
 Are data, network, and applications that are your responsibility secure?
 Is your institution more secure today than it was two years ago?
Table1. Impact of RITS-B’S implementation status over institution’s (both education and corporate
organization) IT security outcomes
Implementation
Status of RITS-B
Approach
IT Security Outcomes
Program is Successful Systems are
Secure
More Secure than 2 years ago
Fully Implemented WA - - -
S.Div. - - -
Partially
Implemented
WA 2.25 1.75 1.25
S.Div. 0.500 0.500 0.500
Didn’t Implement WA 3.50 3.00 2.50
S.Div. 0.707 0.000 0.707
Scale: 1(Strongly Agree) = SA, 2(Agree) = A, 3(Disagree) = D and 4(Strongly Disagree)= SD. N=6 (Institutions), WA=
Weighted Average. S.Div.= Standard Deviation.
Table 1 shows that institutions which implemented the proposed RITS-B approach in their arena either fully or
partially rate their IT security outcomes higher than those which didn’t. This thereby dictates the significance of
having this newly developed security model in the campus arena to gain robustness in the process of secrecy and
security without violating the freedom and openness.
V. Conclusion
The Soft IT Security (SITS) approach is a useful and important technique in higher education
information security. In spite of its excellent persona such as simplicity, effectiveness and incident supervision,
it is unable to achieve global optimum because of academic and departmental diversities. On the other hand, the
proposed Robust IT Security Balancing (RITSB) Approach considers the stages of Identification-Prioritization-
Revision-Dynamicity for an acceptable use of soft security issues over the hard interventions and on the end
user community while considering the academia’s diversities, believes and constraints. In the RITS-B approach,
the degree used for merging the hard and soft security concerns with that of the institution’s belief, culture and
constraints are derived dynamically based on similarity and value criterions of the regions and institutions. For
these reasons, the RITS-B Approach is able to present the institution’s security concerns from a holistic
position. The quantitative survey results show that the institutions which had implemented this proposed
security solution in their arena feeling more secure than two years ago. They also rated their system’s security
and program’s success much higher than that of others. This increases the application area of the SITS approach
where the robustness and dynamisms are needed.
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