CCSP Domain 2 - Digital Rights Management (DRM), Data Retention, Archiving & Deletion MindMap

Download a FREE Printable PDF of all the CCSP MindMaps!

Your information will remain 100% private. Unsubscribe with 1 click.

Transcript

Introduction

Hey, I’m Rob Witcher from Destination Certification, and I’m here to help you pass the CCSP exam. We are going to go through a review of the major topics related to DRM, data retention, archiving and destruction in Domain 2, to understand how they interrelate, and to guide your studies.

Image of Digital Rights Management (DRM), Data Retention, Archiving & Deletion table - Destination Certification

This is the fifth of five videos for Domain 2. I have included links to the other MindMap videos in the description below. These MindMaps are a small part of our complete CCSP MasterClass.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Digital rights management–DRM–is the set of technologies, policies, and practices designed to control the usage, distribution, and access to digital content. Put simply, DRM technologies encrypt videos, music files, ebooks etc., which gives the copyright owner control over who can do what with the media. This includes restrictions on how many times you can play a movie, what device you can play music on, whether or not you can print an ebook, whether you can edit a PDF, etc. DRM technologies allow copyright holders to set and enforce rules on how their content is used.

Consumer DRM

Consumer DRM is a specific type of DRM focused on protecting digital content consumed by individual users, such as music, movies, books, and games. It ensures that content can only be used in ways permitted by the content owner or publisher.

Enterprise DRM

Enterprise DRM refers to broader digital rights management practices applied within organizations, focusing on controlling access and usage of digital content like documents, multimedia, and proprietary business information.

Enterprise DRM is an umbrella term for managing and controlling access to all digital content within an enterprise.

Information Rights Management (IRM)

IRM is a subset of enterprise DRM but focuses more narrowly on the control of sensitive business documents and emails within the enterprise. It applies fine-grained access controls at the document level to ensure that only authorized individuals can read, edit, or forward documents, both within the organization and when shared externally.

Auditing of access / use

Auditing in IRM refers to the ability to track and monitor how protected documents are accessed and used. IRM systems can record detailed information about user activities, such as who opened the file, when it was accessed, and what actions (like printing, editing, or sharing) were performed.

Signing / sealing

Signing involves adding a digital signature to a document to ensure authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. Sealing refers to the encryption of a document to enforce IRM policies and control access. These are two very useful functions of IRM!

Rights based on classification

IRM systems can enforce specific access permissions based on the classification of a document.

Controlling copy & pasting, screenshots

Finally, IRM systems can control all sorts of permissions including copying and pasting of text, taking screenshots, printing, forwarding or sharing, editing or modifying, and even restricting access after a certain date and time.

Fundamentally, IRM systems provide organizations with very granular control over how sensitive documents and data are accessed, shared, and used.

Cloud DRM Challenges

There are a number of challenges related to DRM in the cloud, and they are rooted in the complexity of protecting digital content in distributed, multi-device, and remote environments.

Add to this, DRM relies on trusted environments, but cloud providers have access to the infrastructure. This creates a dependency on third-party providers to ensure content is safeguarded against breaches or insider threats.

Data Retention, Archiving & Deletion

Alright, let’s move on to the second major topic of this MindMap: data retention, archiving, and the deletion of data.

Data retention policies

An important consideration as part of the policy is how long data needs to be retained for, and when data can be archived. There are significant cost implications here. Obviously the more data you are storing in the cloud, the more cost, but there’s more to this. The speed at which you have access to data plays a huge role in how much it costs to store data in the cloud. If you are able to mark data for archiving, and move that data to slower and cheaper storage, then the cost savings can be significant.

Defensible Destruction

Defensible destruction of data in the cloud refers to the systematic and legally compliant process of securely deleting data in a way that can be justified and proven in case of audits, legal inquiries, or regulatory reviews.

Put another way–destroying data in such a way that you can prove it is unrecoverable.

Defensible data destruction can be difficult to achieve in the cloud or impossible with certain services and providers. So you need to look carefully at your Defensible data destruction requirements before you move data to the cloud.

There are many ways to destroy data and some are much better than others. So let’s first go through three main categories, and then specific techniques.

Destruction

The first and very best category is destruction, which means we physically destroy the media that the data is stored on.

Purging

The next best category is known as purging which means using logical or physical techniques to sanitize data–making it so that the data cannot be reconstructed.

Clearing

And finally, the worst category is known as clearing, which means using logical techniques to sanitize the data to a level where it may not be reconstructed. That’s not super reassuring, “may not be reconstructed”.

Media Destruction

Ok, now let’s look at the techniques starting from best to worst. The best is of course to physically destroy the media. Ideally melt it. Burn it to the point that all that is left is some smoke and maybe a puddle of metal. There is no way you are getting that data back.

Shred / Disintegrate / Drill

The next best method is to shred, disintegrate or drill a hole in the media. These techniques are not nearly as good, because with the right tools it is possible to read data even off of little shredded pieces of a hard drive or tape.

Degauss

Degaussing involves applying a very strong magnetic field to magnetic media like hard drives or tapes. The strong magnetic field destroys the data. The reason degaussing fits between destruction and purging is because it may render the media unusable, thus essentially destroying the media.

Crypto shredding

Crypto shredding is the idea that to destroy the data, we encrypt the data with an excellent algorithm like AES-256, and then we destroy every single copy of the encryption key. With the encryption key destroyed, we have effectively crypto shredded the data and made it unrecoverable. Crypto shredding fits between purging and clearing. As long as the key is never recovered, or brute forced, or a flaw is not found in the algorithm, then the data cannot be recovered. It has been purged. But if any of those were true the data may be recoverable and has thus just been cleared.

Overwrite / Wipe / Erasure

Overwriting, wiping or erasure all refer to writing all zeroes or all ones or some combination to all sectors of a storage device replacing the original data with this overwritten data. This process can be done multiple times, but even so, research has shown that pretty much no matter how many times you overwrite the data, some of the original data may be recoverable. Thus, this is a clearing technique.

Format

And the worst method for destroying data is to format the drive. This is the worst technique because formatting by default leaves most if not all existing data on the disk. Meaning the data can easily be recovered with the right tool.

Image of different data destruction methods - Destination Certification

Here’s a nice depiction of the different data destruction methods we just discussed.

Image of Digital Rights Management (DRM), Data Retention, Archiving & Deletion table - Destination Certification

That’s it for our overview of DRM, data retention, archiving and destruction in Domain 2, covering the most important topics you need to know for the exam.

Image of next mindmap - Destination Certification

If you found this video helpful you can hit the thumbs up button and if you want to be notified when we release additional videos in this MindMap series, then please subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notifications.

I will provide links to the other MindMap videos in the description below.

Thanks very much for watching! And all the best in your studies!

Image of masterclass video - Destination Certification

The easiest way to get your CCSP Certification 


Learn more about our CCSP MasterClass

>