From the course: Cert Prep: ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)
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Understanding encryption
From the course: Cert Prep: ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)
Understanding encryption
- Encryption is one of the most important security controls that we can use to protect the confidentiality of our data. Encryption uses math to transform information into a format where it's unreadable by anyone other than authorized users. Now the math behind encryption is pretty complicated, but the good news is that you won't be responsible for any of that math on the exam. You just need to know the basics of what encryption does and how you can use encryption to protect your organization. When we're encrypting data we start with some plain text information. Now, plain text is just a fancy way of saying that we have information in normal form. Anyone who looks at that plain text data can read it. We then take that information and use an encryption algorithm, in combination with an encryption key, to encrypt the data. The algorithm is the mathematical formula for the encryption. And the key is basically the password to the…