CLF-C02 Practice Question 106: S3 Default Encryption
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 11 · question 6 of 10
A company created a new Amazon S3 bucket last week and uploaded files to it. Nobody configured any encryption settings on the bucket. An auditor asks whether those files are encrypted at rest. Which statement is correct?
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Answer:
Amazon S3 applies server-side encryption with Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3) as the base level of encryption for every bucket. Since January 5, 2023, all new object uploads are automatically encrypted at no additional cost and with no impact on performance. Every bucket has encryption configured by default, so these files are encrypted at rest even though nobody changed a setting. Customers can choose a different option, such as SSE-KMS, when they need more control over the keys.
Option A describes how S3 used to work before encryption became the default. Option C confuses two different protections: HTTPS (TLS) protects data in transit to and from S3, while SSE-S3 protects data at rest, and one doesn't depend on the other. Option D is also unrelated. Block Public Access controls *who can access* objects, not whether they are encrypted on disk.
Reference: Protecting data with encryption