ISC2 Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP) Practice Question
Your DevOps team is retiring a cloud-hosted microservice that stored protected health information (PHI) on provider-managed, hardware-encrypted SSD volumes. Because you cannot physically access or degauss the drives, you must satisfy NIST SP 800-88 purge requirements to ensure the data is permanently unrecoverable. Which destruction technique is most appropriate in this situation?
Degauss the underlying storage media to eliminate residual magnetism.
Issue a cryptographic erase that destroys the drive's encryption keys, rendering all stored data unreadable.
Delete the application files and empty the operating system's recycle bin.
Overwrite the entire volume once with zeros using a disk utility such as dd.
Cryptographic erasure meets the NIST SP 800-88 definition of a purge method by rendering data unrecoverable through destruction of the encryption keys protecting the media. Because the SSDs are managed by the cloud provider, you cannot rely on physical destruction or degaussing-and degaussing is ineffective on solid-state media anyway. Logical file deletion does not remove the data, and a single-pass overwrite may be insufficient or infeasible on SSDs whose controllers remap blocks. Therefore, issuing a cryptographic erase command that invalidates the drive's encryption keys is the most appropriate and reliable method for secure data destruction in this scenario.
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ISC2 Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP)
Secure Software Lifecycle Management
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