If you can decode it, it was never encryption: untangling encoding, hashing, and encryption for Security+ (opens in new tab)

Three words show up constantly on the SY0-701 exam and in real security work, and they get blended together more than almost anything else: encoding, hashing, and encryption. All three turn readable data into something that looks scrambled, so people treat them as interchangeable. The exam writes questions specifically to catch you doing that. Here is the clean mental model that finally fixed it for me. Encoding is for compatibility, not secrecy Encoding changes the format of data so a system...