ISC2 Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) Practice Question
Your company is building a serverless API on AWS that must encrypt individual JSON attributes (each <200 bytes) before writing them to Amazon DynamoDB. The solution should minimize CPU cycles in the Lambda functions, provide strong confidentiality, and scale to millions of records with simple key management. Which approach best meets these requirements?
Hash each attribute with SHA-256 and store only the hash value in DynamoDB to protect confidentiality
Apply Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) with a P-256 public key, keeping the private key in AWS CloudHSM for decryption
Encrypt each attribute directly with a 2048-bit RSA public key and store the corresponding private key in AWS Secrets Manager for decryption when needed
Request a 256-bit data key from AWS Key Management Service for each record and use it to encrypt the attribute locally with AES-256-GCM, storing the ciphertext and the encrypted data key in the table
Using envelope encryption with AWS KMS off-loads key generation and management to the managed service, while letting the Lambda function perform only a fast symmetric operation (AES-256-GCM) on each small payload. Symmetric encryption is orders of magnitude faster and less CPU-intensive than public-key operations. RSA or ECIES would add unnecessary computational overhead to every write, and storing private keys in Secrets Manager or CloudHSM increases complexity. Hashing with SHA-256 is inappropriate because hashing is one-way; the data could not be decrypted for later use. Therefore, envelope encryption with KMS-generated data keys is the most efficient, secure, and scalable choice.
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ISC2 Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP)
Cryptography
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