From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
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Data obfuscation
From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts
Data obfuscation
An alternative to removing data from a dataset is transforming it into a format where the original information can't be retrieved. This is a process called data obfuscation, and we have several tools at our disposal to assist with this process. First, we can use a hash function to transform a value in our dataset to a hash value. Remember, from our discussion of hash functions earlier, that these are one-way functions. If we apply a strong hash function to a data element, we may replace the value in our file with the hashed value. Well, it isn't possible to retrieve the original value directly from the hashed value. There is one major flaw to this approach. If someone has a list of possible values for a field, they can conduct a rainbow table attack. In this attack, the attacker computes the hashes of those candidate values and then checks to see if those hashes exist in the data file. Let's say we had a file listing all of the students at a college who have failed courses, but we…
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