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EC-Council

312-50V9 · Question #261

The company ABC recently contracted a new accountant. The accountant will be working with the financial statements. Those financial statements need to be approved by the CFO and then they will be…

The correct answer is B. The CFO can use a hash algorithm in the document once he approved the financial statements. A cryptographic hash algorithm generates a unique fixed-length digest of a document that allows the recipient to verify whether the content was altered after approval.

Cryptography

Question

The company ABC recently contracted a new accountant. The accountant will be working with the financial statements. Those financial statements need to be approved by the CFO and then they will be sent to the accountant but the CFO is worried because he wants to be sure that the information sent to the accountant was not modified once he approved it. What of the following options can be useful to ensure the integrity of the data?

Options

  • AThe document can be sent to the accountant using an exclusive USB for that document.
  • BThe CFO can use a hash algorithm in the document once he approved the financial statements.
  • CThe financial statements can be sent twice, one by email and the other delivered in USB and the
  • DThe CFO can use an excel file with a password.

How the community answered

(23 responses)
  • A
    4% (1)
  • B
    91% (21)
  • D
    4% (1)

Why each option

A cryptographic hash algorithm generates a unique fixed-length digest of a document that allows the recipient to verify whether the content was altered after approval.

AThe document can be sent to the accountant using an exclusive USB for that document.

Transferring via a dedicated USB controls the physical delivery path but provides no cryptographic mechanism to detect tampering that could occur before or during the transfer process.

BThe CFO can use a hash algorithm in the document once he approved the financial statements.Correct

A hash algorithm such as SHA-256 produces a deterministic, fixed-length fingerprint of the document at the moment of CFO approval; any modification to even a single character after that point will produce a completely different hash value when recomputed by the recipient. The CFO shares both the document and its hash, and the accountant recomputes the hash upon receipt to confirm they match, directly verifying data integrity. This mechanism addresses integrity - confirming the document is identical to what was approved - without requiring the document to be encrypted.

CThe financial statements can be sent twice, one by email and the other delivered in USB and the

Sending the document via two channels provides delivery redundancy but cannot verify integrity; both copies could be identically altered, and differences between copies would not identify which version is authentic.

DThe CFO can use an excel file with a password.

An Excel file password enforces access control to restrict who can open the file, but it does not create a tamper-evident record or detect whether an authorized user modified the content after approval.

Concept tested: Hash algorithms for data integrity assurance

Source: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/hash-functions

Topics

#data integrity#hashing#cryptographic hash#document security

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