Book Image

CompTIA Security+ Certification Guide

By : Ian Neil
Book Image

CompTIA Security+ Certification Guide

By: Ian Neil

Overview of this book

CompTIA Security+ is a worldwide certification that establishes the fundamental knowledge required to perform core security functions and pursue an IT security career. CompTIA Security+ Certification Guide is a best-in-class exam study guide that covers all of CompTIA Security+ 501 exam objectives. It is authored by Ian Neil, who is a world-class trainer of CompTIA Security+ 501. Packed with self-assessment scenarios and realistic exam questions, this guide will help you master the core concepts to succeed in the exam the first time you take it. Using relevant examples, you will learn all the important security fundamentals from Certificates and Encryption to Identity and Access Management concepts. You will then dive into the important domains of the exam; namely, threats, attacks and vulnerabilities, technologies and tools, architecture and design, risk management, and cryptography and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). This book comes with over 600 practice questions with detailed explanation that is at the exam level and also includes two mock exams to help you with your study plan. This guide will ensure that encryption and certificates are made easy for you.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
12
Mock Exam 1
13
Mock Exam 2
15
Acronyms

Key Stretching Algorithms

The concept of key stretching is to insert a random set of characters to increase the size of the password hash, making things harder for a brute-force attack:

  • BCRYPT: BCRYPT is a password-hashing algorithm based on the Blowfish cipher. It is used to salt the passwords; a random string is inserted to increase the password length to help protect against rainbow table attacks. It also has an adaptive function where the iteration count can be increased to make it slower, so it remains resistant to attacks even with increasing computation power.
  • PBKDF2: PBKDF2 stores passwords with a random salt and with the password hash using HMAC; it then iterates, which forces the regeneration of every password and prevents any rainbow table attack.