CompTIA Security+ — Practice Exam
1.0 General Security Concepts: practice questions
Our CompTIA Security+ bank has 38 questions on this topic. Here are 5 of them with answers; the full mock exam draws from every topic, like the real one.
Question 1
A sign reading 'Area under 24-hour video surveillance' is mainly which control type?
- Deterrent
- Detective
- Corrective
- Compensating
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A. Deterrent — A warning sign discourages an attacker before acting, which makes it deterrent. The cameras themselves would be detective.
Question 2
Which of these is a symmetric block cipher standardized by NIST?
- RSA
- ECDSA
- Diffie-Hellman
- AES
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D. AES — FIPS 197 specifies AES with 128-bit blocks and 128-, 192- or 256-bit keys. RSA and ECDSA are asymmetric; Diffie-Hellman is key agreement.
Question 3
Replacing a credit card number with a random value that maps back to the real number only in a secure vault is called what?
- Hashing
- Tokenization
- Steganography
- Salting
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B. Tokenization — Tokenization swaps sensitive data for a token with no mathematical relationship to it; only the token vault can map it back.
Question 4
In change management, what is a backout plan?
- The list of stakeholders who must approve the change before it starts
- A test of the change in a staging environment
- Steps to return to the previous state if the change fails
- The time window agreed for making the change
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C. Steps to return to the previous state if the change fails — A backout (rollback) plan restores the prior configuration if a change causes problems.
Question 5
Which cryptographic key must be kept secret in a public key infrastructure?
- The public key
- The certificate
- The private key
- The CA's public key
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C. The private key — In asymmetric cryptography the public key can be shared openly; the private key must be protected because it decrypts and signs.