Encryption is a process that encodes sensitive information so that only authorized parties can access it. When data is encrypted, it is converted into ciphertext, which appears random and meaningless. This makes it an effective mitigation technique against a variety of threats, such as data eavesdropping or theft. Hashing, being a one-way function, is designed for verifying the integrity of data and is not meant for encrypting or securing data itself. Tokenization substitutes sensitive data with non-sensitive equivalents, which does not entail converting data into a coded form. Hence, it is not the correct answer in the context of data encoding for protection.