A healthcare analytics company receives patient data from multiple hospitals. The company wants to perform statistical analysis without exposing the actual patient identifiers. The hospitals need to be able to update the data later. Which technique should the company use?

Encrypt the patient identifiers with a key shared with all hospitals.

Hash the patient identifiers with a salt and discard the salt.

Tokenize the patient identifiers and store the mapping in a secure vault.

Truncate the patient identifiers to the first three characters.

A payment gateway stores credit card numbers in a database. To reduce PCI DSS scope, the company wants to replace card numbers with random values that can be mapped back to the original data only by a separate, highly protected service. The mapping service must be able to look up the original card number when a transaction is reprocessed. Which approach should the company implement?

Encrypt each card number with AES-256 using a key stored in the database and store the ciphertext.

Generate a random token for each card number, store the token in the database, and keep the token-to-card mapping in a separate vault service.

Apply a deterministic format-preserving encryption algorithm and store the encrypted value in the database.

Hash each card number with a salted SHA-256 hash and store the hash in the database.

An organization uses AES-256 to encrypt files at rest. What is a key characteristic of AES-256?

It is a one-way function that cannot be reversed

It produces a fixed-size hash of the data

It uses a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption

It uses the same key for encryption and decryption

CompTIASecurityX (CASP+)

Domain 3Objective 5

Cryptographic Techniques CAS-005 Practice Questions (Page 5)

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 21–25

21application · medium
A healthcare analytics company receives patient data from multiple hospitals. The company wants to perform statistical analysis without exposing the actual patient identifiers. The hospitals need to be able to update the data later. Which technique should the company use?
Select an answer first
22foundation · easy
A payment processor stores credit card numbers in a database. To reduce the risk of exposure, the processor replaces each card number with a randomly generated value that has no mathematical relationship to the original. Later, the processor uses a secure vault to map the random value back to the original card number when needed. Which technique is being used?
Select an answer first
23application · medium
A payment gateway stores credit card numbers in a database. To reduce PCI DSS scope, the company wants to replace card numbers with random values that can be mapped back to the original data only by a separate, highly protected service. The mapping service must be able to look up the original card number when a transaction is reprocessed. Which approach should the company implement?
Select an answer first
24foundation · easy
An organization uses AES-256 to encrypt files at rest. What is a key characteristic of AES-256?
Select an answer first
25foundation · easy
Two servers need to exchange encrypted data over a private network. They share a single secret key that is used both to encrypt and to decrypt the data. Which type of cryptography is this?
Select an answer first

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Cryptographic Techniques CAS-005 Practice Questions (Page 5)

Questions 21–25

A healthcare analytics company receives patient data from multiple hospitals. The company wants to perform statistical analysis without exposing the actual patient identifiers. The hospitals need to be able to update the data later. Which technique should the company use?

An organization uses AES-256 to encrypt files at rest. What is a key characteristic of AES-256?

Two servers need to exchange encrypted data over a private network. They share a single secret key that is used both to encrypt and to decrypt the data. Which type of cryptography is this?

Keep studying — Security engineering