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CISSP study material · question 157 of 500

A hosting provider must sanitize thousands of self-encrypting drives within a maintenance window that would not allow a full overwrite. Which technique does NIST SP 800-88 offer, and how does it work?

  1. Cryptographic erase, which sanitizes the keys rather than the data and so completes rapidly.
  2. Firmware reset to factory state, which discards the mapping tables.
  3. A single-pass clear, which is fast enough at scale to substitute for purge.
  4. Degaussing, which acts on the whole platter at once regardless of capacity.
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Answer: A. Cryptographic erase, which sanitizes the keys rather than the data and so completes rapidly.

Cryptographic erase is a purge technique that works by sanitizing the keys that encrypt the data, giving high assurance far faster than techniques that must touch every block.

Source: NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 (NIST) — SP 800-88 Rev. 2 > 3.2 Use of Cryptography and Cryptographic Erase

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