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Difficulty: EasyData Protection and Storage Security Architecture

An e-commerce enterprise needs to process customer payment cards while ensuring that actual Primary Account Numbers (PANs) are never stored in internal application databases. The security architecture replaces sensitive card numbers with non-sensitive surrogate values while storing the real card numbers in a secure external vault. Which of the following data protection mechanisms is being described?

  1. TokenizationAnswer
  2. B
    Asymmetric bulk encryption
  3. C
    Digital signatures
  4. D
    Host-based intrusion prevention filtering

Answer

Tokenization is the technique that substitutes sensitive data with non-sensitive surrogate tokens mapped to an external vault.
Tokenization replaces sensitive values such as payment card details with randomly generated surrogate values (tokens). The actual data is securely stored in a centralized token vault outside the local application databases, significantly reducing compliance scope.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the operational requirements of the storage security scenario
Identified the goal: replacing actual credit card numbers in local databases with placeholder values connected to a secure central vault.
Understanding the mechanism helps differentiate between mathematical cryptographic transformations and surrogate data replacement.
2
Evaluate candidate storage protection mechanisms against the scenario characteristics
Tokenization maps sensitive inputs to random non-cryptographic tokens, matching the scenario exactly.
Tokenization avoids mathematical encryption algorithms directly on stored database fields, reducing regulatory exposure.

Key Concept

Data Tokenization in Storage Architecture
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Topics

Data Protection and Storage Security Architecture

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