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CISSP study material · question 15 of 500

A cloud provider must decommission self-encrypting drives from a multi-tenant storage array inside a two-hour maintenance window far too short for a full-block overwrite of the array. Each drive holds ciphertext belonging to many tenants, and the drives are leased and must be returned to the lessor in working order. Which sanitisation method meets these constraints?

  1. Physical destruction, shredding each drive to particles and issuing the lessor a certificate of destruction.
  2. Degaussing each drive with a magnetic field strong enough to disrupt the domains recorded across the platters.
  3. Cryptographic erase, destroying the media encryption key so that the ciphertext left on the drive cannot be decrypted.
  4. Overwriting every addressable block with a random pattern and verifying each drive before it is handed back.
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Answer: C. Cryptographic erase, destroying the media encryption key so that the ciphertext left on the drive cannot be decrypted.

Destroying the key renders the ciphertext unrecoverable within the window and leaves the leased drive intact; degaussing and shredding ruin hardware the provider is obliged to return.

Source: NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 (NIST) — SP 800-88 Rev. 2 > Keywords

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