CISSP Certification: Most Detailed Course on Domain 3 - 2026

Trace the origins of cryptography from the Caesar cipher to the Enigma rotor machine, covering rotation three and monoalphabetic cipher, and how the allies cracked it in 1940.

Explore the four goals of cryptography: confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation, and how encryption and hashing protect them. Examine two-factor authentication and challenge-response, and non-repudiation with public and private keys.

Explore the foundations of cryptography, including plaintext, cipher, and cryptographic algorithms. Understand how keys define the key space and key size, and how public and private keys work.

Examine modular function concepts and one-way functions, plus initialization vectors and zero-knowledge proofs, to understand secure cryptography and two-subject authorization with separation of duties.

Examine asymmetric key algorithms, encrypting with the recipient’s public key and decrypting with the recipient’s private key, and signing messages with the sender’s private key verifiable by the public key.

Describe symmetric cryptography fundamentals, including des, triple des, aes, and key management; explain des block size, parity, and five modes: ecb, cbc, cfb, ofb, and ctr.

Survey symmetric algorithms such as the international data encryption algorithm (eda), Blowfish, Skipjack, Ark5, ais, and Twofish, noting 64-bit blocks, 128-bit keys, subkeys, and pre whitening and post whitening.

Explore symmetric key management, including creation and exchange methods (offline, public-key, Diffie-Hellman), secure storage with split-knowledge, and key escrow systems such as Fair Cryptosystem and ESE.

Learn public key infrastructure and cryptography applications, including asymmetric cryptography and digital signatures. Explore PKI elements like certificates, authorities, and hash functions, and practical attack mitigation.

Explore key cryptography concepts, including asymmetric key types, public key systems, hash functions and algorithms, digital signatures, the structure of public infrastructure, and cryptographic applications for emails, web, and networking.

Explore asymmetric cryptography by examining public and private keys, RSA, and the workflow where a sender encrypts with the recipient’s public key and the recipient decrypts with the private key.

Explore two additional asymmetric encryption algorithms, their link to symmetry key management, and compare RSA with elliptic curve cryptography, highlighting elliptic curve discrete logarithm complexity and its bandwidth implications.

Identify hash functions and the secure hash algorithm family, including sha-1 and sha-2 variants and md2, md4, and md5, and examine message digests for integrity.

Explore public key infrastructure (pki), including digital certificates, certificate authorities, and registration authorities, and how asymmetric cryptography, hashing, and x.509 digital signatures enable trusted identity and secure communication.

Explore asymmetric key management by selecting a public, well-tested encryption algorithm and balancing performance with security. Safeguard the private key, renew certificates regularly, and back up keys.

Explore how cryptography secures network services, including link and end-to-end encryption, IPsec with AH and ESP, ISAKMP, and wireless security with WEP and WPA2.

Investigate analytic, implementation, and statistical cryptographic attacks, brute-force methods, and rainbow tables, and learn how salting hashes strengthens password storage against these threats.

Examine frequency analysis and ciphertext-only attacks, including transposition and substitution, and review other methods like known plaintext, chosen ciphertext, chosen plaintext, meet-in-the-middle, man-in-the-middle, burst, and replay.