thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Security Fundamentals & Crypto · Intermediate

Crypto-Shredding

Rendering encrypted data unrecoverable by securely destroying the encryption keys.

Definition

Crypto-shredding (cryptographic erasure) is practical when physical destruction is impossible, such as in multi-tenant cloud storage. If all copies of the key are destroyed, the ciphertext becomes useless. NIST SP 800-88 recognizes cryptographic erase as a sanitization technique.

Example

Deleting a customer-managed key in a cloud KMS after its waiting period makes all data encrypted under it unreadable.

Exam tip

Crypto-shredding is the preferred cloud data destruction method on CCSP and Security+.

Related terms