Western Governors University (WGU) ITAS 2142 D830 Introduction to Cryptography Practice Exam

Replacing sensitive data with non-sensitive tokens is tokenization. In this approach, the actual value is swapped for a token that has no meaning on its own, and a separate, highly secure vault holds the mapping between tokens and the real data. This lets systems work with the tokens while the real data stays protected, reducing exposure risk because the tokens cannot be used to derive the original value without access to the vault. This differs from encryption, which transforms data into ciphertext that can be decrypted with a key to recover the original value, and from data masking, which obscures the value in place to hide the sensitive information and is not designed for reversible lookup. Steganography hides data inside another medium and isn’t used to replace database fields for processing.