What is encryption at rest?

Encryption at rest refers to the cryptographic encoding of data when it is persevered on physical media. Encryption at rest is supposed to protect data from at rest attacks, including attempts to obtain physical media access where the data is stored. In such an attack, a server's hard drive may have been stolen or misplaced, allowing an attacker to recover data from the hard drive by putting it into a compute device of their own. Encryption at rest is designed to prevent critical data access by unauthorized persons by ensuring that the data remains encrypted when it resides on a disk. An attacker can obtain a hard drive with data in an encrypted format, but without access to the encryption keys, they would not ...

Get Practical Network Scanning now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.