A retail company stores customer email addresses. The marketing team needs to query the database to find the email address for a specific customer ID. The security team wants to minimize the risk of a data breach exposing the email addresses. Which approach best balances usability and security?

Mask the email addresses by showing only the first and last characters.

Tokenize the email addresses and store the mapping in a separate, access-controlled vault.

Hash the email addresses with a salt and store only the hash.

Encrypt the email addresses with a key stored in the same database.

A company needs to encrypt data at rest in a database. The security team is considering using symmetric encryption with a key stored in a hardware security module (HSM). Which statement best describes the advantage of this approach?

The HSM provides fast encryption and decryption while keeping the key secure.

The HSM provides a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption.

The HSM eliminates the need for key management.

The HSM allows the database to encrypt data without using any CPU resources.

CompTIASecurityX (CASP+)

Domain 3Objective 5

Cryptographic Techniques CAS-005 Practice Questions (Page 2)

Part of the Security engineering domain, which accounts for 31% of the CAS-005 exam. CompTIA does not publish an official question count, but from its 165-minute exam (~65–110 total, ~20–34 in this domain), expect 4–7 from this objective — we provide 26 practice questions to prepare you well beyond it. (estimate)

26questions here

6free pages

7concepts

31%of the exam

Questions 6–10

6expert · hard
A retail company stores customer email addresses. The marketing team needs to query the database to find the email address for a specific customer ID. The security team wants to minimize the risk of a data breach exposing the email addresses. Which approach best balances usability and security?
Select an answer first
7foundation · easy
A user wants to send a confidential message to a colleague. The user encrypts the message with the colleague's public key. What key must the colleague use to decrypt the message?
Select an answer first
8foundation · easy
An organization stores sensitive files encrypted with a dedicated encryption key. To securely dispose of these files, the organization destroys the encryption key, making the encrypted data unrecoverable. Which data destruction method is this?
Select an answer first
9expert · medium
A company needs to encrypt data at rest in a database. The security team is considering using symmetric encryption with a key stored in a hardware security module (HSM). Which statement best describes the advantage of this approach?
Select an answer first
10foundation · easy
A lawyer sends a contract to a client and wants to prove that the client received the exact document and that the client cannot deny having sent a reply. Which cryptographic technique provides non-repudiation for the client's reply?
Select an answer first

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Cryptographic Techniques CAS-005 Practice Questions (Page 2)

Questions 6–10

A retail company stores customer email addresses. The marketing team needs to query the database to find the email address for a specific customer ID. The security team wants to minimize the risk of a data breach exposing the email addresses. Which approach best balances usability and security?

A user wants to send a confidential message to a colleague. The user encrypts the message with the colleague's public key. What key must the colleague use to decrypt the message?

An organization stores sensitive files encrypted with a dedicated encryption key. To securely dispose of these files, the organization destroys the encryption key, making the encrypted data unrecoverable. Which data destruction method is this?

A company needs to encrypt data at rest in a database. The security team is considering using symmetric encryption with a key stored in a hardware security module (HSM). Which statement best describes the advantage of this approach?

A lawyer sends a contract to a client and wants to prove that the client received the exact document and that the client cannot deny having sent a reply. Which cryptographic technique provides non-repudiation for the client's reply?

Keep studying — Security engineering