Data In transit vs. Data At Rest

Data in transit, or data in motion, is data actively moving from one location to another such as across the internet or through a private network. Data at rest is data that is not actively moving from device to device or network to network such as data stored on a hard drive, laptop, flash drive, or archived/stored in some other way.

The Role of Encryption In Data Protection In Transit and At Rest

For protecting data in transit, enterprises often choose to encrypt sensitive data prior to moving and/or use encrypted connections (HTTPS, SSL, TLS, FTPS, etc) to protect the contents of data in transit. For protecting data at rest, enterprises can simply encrypt sensitive files prior to storing them and/or choose to encrypt the storage drive itself.

Questions

From your day to day computer use, provide examples of when data is at rest and when it is in transit.

For example, when I open my Documents Folder on Windows and open my School Folder that has my notes in a .txt file, that's an example of data at rest because it is stored, still, not in motion. For an example of data in transit it can be me sending an email to my friend.

Explain the role data encryption with regards to the CIA triad.

In terms of confidentiality, encryption helps protect the confidentiality of data by making it unreadable to unauthorized users who do not have the key or password to decrypt it. For integrity, encryption ensures that it has not been modified or tampered with in transit or at rest. By encrypting data, any unauthorized changes to the data will cause the decryption process to fail, alerting the recipient that the data has been tampered with. With encryption, even if an attacker steals data, they will not be able to use or read it without the key or password. This can help prevent data loss and ensure that data remains available to authorized users. Thats the availability part.