Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)Cloud Data SecurityEasy
A financial institution is migrating highly sensitive customer records to a cloud data warehouse. To comply with privacy regulations and minimize the risk of data exposure in case of a breach, they decide to replace actual credit card numbers and personally identifiable information (PII) with unique, non-sensitive surrogate values. The original sensitive data needs to be recoverable for specific authorized processes. Which data security technique is being applied?
- AHashing
- BData Anonymization
- CData Masking
- DTokenization
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Tokenization
Tokenization replaces sensitive data with a randomly generated, non-sensitive token, while maintaining the ability to retrieve the original data through a secure vault. This fits the requirement of replacing sensitive data with surrogates while allowing recovery.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Hashing generates a fixed-size output that is irreversible, meaning the original data cannot be recovered from the hash.
- B. Data anonymization aims to irreversibly remove PII, making the original data non-recoverable, which contradicts the requirement.
- C. Data masking typically obscures data (e.g., partial redaction) and may not always allow full recovery, particularly for static masking.
Tokenization
A data security technique that replaces sensitive data with a unique, non-sensitive identifier (token) that has no extrinsic meaning or exploitable value, while the original data is stored securely elsewhere.
- Replaces sensitive data with a token.
- Original data is stored in a secure token vault.
- Original data can be retrieved from the token.
- Commonly used for credit card numbers and PII.
Memory trick: Masks hide, tokens replace, hashes seal, anonymize deletes.