Quick Lesson - What is Encryption?

This lesson will help CISSP candidates (and hopefully everyone else) to fully understand what encryption is, and how it works from a lay person’s perspective. For students, this is part of the CBK Domain 3, Security Architecture and Engineering.

Very simply put, encryption is the process of changing something called plaintext (or cleartext) into something called cipher text for the purpose of secrecy.

Encryption provides the service of confidentiality in the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability).