Protecting data and services with cryptography

There are two broad categories of data that encryption protects, that is data in transit and data at rest. Data in transit is data that is moving. It could be from a server to a client or from an email sender to a receiver. There is an attack referred to as man-in-the-middle where data in transit is intercepted by a third party that reads, tampers with, or deletes the data as it is sent to the recipient. Encryption prevents the interception and reading or modification of data by the unauthorized party. Data in storage is data stored on a hard drive, a database, an external storage device, or any other container for storing data. Encryption prevents attackers from accessing this data or modifying it.

Data at rest

...