3.3b — States of Data & Sovereignty (11)

Data at rest

Data stored on a device: hard drive, SSD, flash drive. Considered "at rest" regardless of whether it's encrypted.

Full disk encryption

Encrypting an entire storage device rather than individual files.

Data in transit (data in motion)

Data actively moving across a network.

TLS (data-in-transit protection)

Encrypts traffic to/from a web server.

IPSec (data-in-transit protection)

Used for site-to-site VPNs to encrypt all traffic crossing a link.

Data in use

Data actively loaded into RAM or being processed by the CPU. Almost always decrypted at this stage since the system must read it to work with it.

Data in use vulnerability

The weak point even when at-rest and in-transit encryption are both solid, because processing requires decryption. Example: Target breach RAM-scraping malware.

Three states of data summary

At rest = storage, protected by disk/file encryption. In transit = network, protected by TLS/IPSec/firewall. In use = RAM/CPU, hardest to protect since it must be decrypted to be processed.

Data sovereignty

Data stored within a country is subject to that country's laws, regardless of where the company is headquartered.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

EU regulation; among its requirements, data collected on EU citizens must be stored within the EU.

Geolocation

Determining a user's physical location using GPS, Wi-Fi (802.11) data, or mobile provider information, used for access control decisions.