ISC2 Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP) Practice Question
During a security design review, a team must store employees Social Security numbers in a relational database but still allow the application to retrieve the original value when needed. Regulators require the data to remain confidential even from database administrators. Which control best satisfies this requirement?
Apply dynamic data masking to the SSN column so administrators see only partial values.
Use Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt all traffic between the application server and the database.
Encrypt the SSN column using a strong algorithm and store the encryption keys in a dedicated hardware security module.
Salt and hash each SSN with SHA-256 before writing it to the database.
Encrypting the sensitive column and protecting the encryption keys in an external hardware security module keeps the Social Security numbers unreadable in the database files and any backups. Only the application, which can securely access the keys, can decrypt the data when necessary. Transport Layer Security protects data only while it is moving over the network, not when it is stored. Hashing with SHA-256 is irreversible, so the application could never recover the original SSN values that it must display or transmit. Dynamic data masking merely obscures what certain users see; the underlying data remains in clear text on disk and can still be viewed by privileged administrators. Therefore, column-level encryption with keys kept outside the database is the correct choice for enforcing confidentiality of data at rest against insider access.
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ISC2 Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP)
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