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NIST CSF PR.DS-01 NIST CSF PR.DS-02 NIST CSF PR.DS-10 CompTIA Security+ 3.3 NIST 800-53 SC-28
TechKnowSurge Catalog Interactives Rest, Transit, or Process?
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Rest, Transit, or Process?

A quick warm-up on the three states data can be in: at rest, in transit, and in process.

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

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About this interactive

Before you can decide how to encrypt data, you have to know where it is. The lesson names three places: at rest, in transit, and in process. This warm-up drills just that one question, one situation at a time, until the answer comes quickly. Ask what the data is doing right now. Data at rest is being stored somewhere: on a disk, a tape, a USB stick, in a database, or in a cloud account. This is where disk, volume and file encryption like BitLocker apply. Data in transit is moving across a network, especially the internet: a checkout page sending a card number, an email crossing between mail servers, a file uploading. This is where TLS and HTTPS apply. Data in process is being worked on right now: loaded into memory while the processor calculates, sorts, filters or edits it. Encrypting data in process is the hardest of the three, because the data has to be decrypted to be worked on, which is why it is the least common. A few cards are built to catch the most common mix-up, which is treating any kind of movement as "in transit." A laptop in a backpack on a train is moving, but its data is not being sent anywhere; it is stored on the drive, so it is at rest. A USB stick that just received a copied file is at rest once the copy is done; the word "copy" tells you how the file got there, not what it is doing now. And "cloud" does not mean moving: photos sitting in a cloud account are at rest, while a video in the middle of uploading to that same account is in transit. Other cards test the idea that the same data changes state. A database holds data at rest, but the rows a query has loaded into memory and is sorting are in process, and the results it sends to another machine are in transit. An email crosses the internet in transit, sits in a mailbox at rest, and is in process while a spam filter reads it. Name the state by the moment the card describes, not by what the data was before or will be after.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

NIST CSF
PR.DS-01 The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data-at-rest are protected.
PR.DS-02 The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data-in-transit are protected.
PR.DS-10 The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data-in-use are protected.
CompTIA Security+
3.3 Compare and contrast concepts and strategies to protect data.
NIST 800-53
SC-28 Protection of Information at Rest

Key terms

Data States
The three conditions in which data exists — in transit (being transmitted), at rest (stored), and in use (being processed) — each presenting distinct security risks.
Data at Rest
Data that is stored on a device or medium and not actively moving through a network, which can be encrypted at the disk, partition, volume, file, or database level.
Data in Process
Data being actively used or computed by a processor, requiring decryption from memory to be handled and presenting the highest CPU performance cost of the three encryption states.
Encryption
The process of converting readable data into an unreadable format using an algorithm and key to prevent unauthorized access.
Transport Layer Security
TLS
A cryptographic protocol that provides secure communication over a network, successor to SSL.
BitLocker
BitLocker is Microsoft Windows' built-in full-volume encryption feature that uses AES to protect data on drives, leveraging TPM hardware to bind encryption keys to a specific system configuration.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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