What is the process called that transforms data into a code to ensure its security?

The process that transforms data into a code to ensure its security is called encryption. This is a critical cybersecurity practice since it obscures the information, making it unreadable to unauthorized users. When data is encrypted, it is turned into a format that can only be reverted to its original form by those who possess the appropriate decryption key or password.

Encryption serves multiple purposes, including protecting sensitive information from hackers, ensuring confidentiality in communications, and maintaining the integrity and authenticity of data. It is widely used in various applications, from securing emails to protecting financial transactions online.

Other processes mentioned, such as decryption, hashing, and encoding, serve different purposes. While hashing is used for data integrity verification and does not allow for retrieval of the original data, and encoding is primarily about transforming data into a different format for data storage or transmission (not primarily for security), decryption is the reverse process of encryption, used to convert the encoded data back to its readable format. Therefore, the distinction lies in the main goal: encryption is focused on securing data.