How To Pass Your INFOSEC Exam, Part 1

Explore plain text and cipher text, encryption and decryption, the cryptographic key and key space, and contrast symmetric versus asymmetric encryption with initialization vectors.

Explore how Alice and Bob establish a session key by encrypting a symmetric key with Bob's public key, optimizing confidentiality and efficiency in online sessions.

Learn how public key infrastructure uses asymmetric encryption and hashing to issue digital certificates signed by certificate authorities, with registration authorities verifying identities and browsers validating certificates against revocation lists.

Explore how network devices route traffic through ports, detailing well-known, registered, and dynamic ranges and common protocols such as web traffic, email, SMTP, and SSL.

Explore the network boundary and the dmz to manage risk between internal systems and the external world, and examine firewalls, bastion hosts, honeypots, and honeynet.

Learn how firewalls use static inspection to enforce set rules across traffic, and dynamic inspection to detect anomalies, while employing deep packet inspection, stateful inspection, proxies, and web application firewalls.

Apply AAA concepts—authenticate users, grant authorization, and log actions for accountability—while reviewing protocols like IAP and LIHEAP that may appear on exams.

Explore centralized storage with san and nas, centralizing data for use by multiple users, review raid levels (raid 0, 1, 5, 10, 15), and consider security, availability, and cost.

Explore how malware forms a botnet of zombies to wage distributed denial of service attacks, perform brute force encryption attacks, mine bitcoin, and store illicit files across compromised devices.

Implement anti malware solutions—hardware, software, or both—on hosts or at network gateways, with signature updates and vendor monitoring to detect infections, enabling defense and depth while balancing productivity.

Explore the three cloud service models—IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—and compare who manages hardware, OS, platforms, applications, data, and users, along with cost and flexibility implications.

Explore software defined networking in cloud data centers, revealing the three planes—application, control, and data—plus northbound and southbound interfaces and east-west traffic.

Injection attacks are a top threat in OWASP's Top 10, covered in the database section. Download the free OWASP Top 10 document (2017 version) to quickly understand the exam concepts.

Explore static analysis with white box testing, dynamic analysis with black box testing, and coverage metrics, automated and human reviews using known good and bad data, while avoiding live data.

Examine acceptance testing where customers verify software in a test environment mirroring production and sign acceptance. Compare the older certification and accreditation approach with the move to continuous monitoring.

Adopt strong password policies and remove default admin or guest credentials, use NAT and PAT to conceal internal IPs, and centralize logs with Simsim systems for automated and manual review.