Microsoft® Windows® Security: Essentials

Chapter 10

Enforcing Confidentiality with Encryption

A key part of the security triad (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) is confidentiality. Authentication and access controls help protect data from loss of confidentiality, and you can also encrypt data to protect it. The two primary ways of encrypting data are symmetric and asymmetric encryption. You can also provide one-way encryption with hashing functions.

Encryption and cryptographic methods are used to protect many types of data used in day-to-day work by many end users. For example, many users regularly encrypt and digitally sign email to provide different protections. Similarly, many users use the NTFS built-in feature Encrypting File System (EFS) to encrypt important folders ...