From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
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Goals of cryptography
From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
Goals of cryptography
Security professionals use cryptography for several different reasons. We can describe those reasons using the five goals of cryptography. First, the most common goal of cryptography is to preserve confidentiality. Confidentiality ensures that unauthorized individuals are not able to gain access to sensitive information. If Alice and Bob are communicating with each other using encryption, they want to ensure that their communication remains private. And even if a third party, Mal, intercepts their communication, she is unable to read the contents of those messages. When we use cryptography to protect the confidentiality of information, we consider three different states of data where it might be exposed to prying eyes. Data at rest is data stored on a hard drive or other storage device. We can use encryption to protect stored data so that it remains protected even if the device is lost or stolen. Data in transit is being sent over a network between two systems. We use encryption to…