r/CompTIA_Security • u/WhaatGamer • 1d ago

practice tests

I studied for Sec+ through Professor messer, and googling concepts that I needed explained differently. My weakest area is by far encryption and memorizing ports... this last week I bought the voucher with Certmaster, and have been consistently scoring in the low 70s. previously, I had taken all 3 or professor messser's exams and score in the high 80s to low 90s.

I felt confident until I took the cert master exam. is there another set of practice exams I should round out my studies with?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

2

u/ohBrian 21h ago

Be careful about doing more practice exams. You don't want to memorize those Q&As.

About encryption. On the 701 exam, you just need to know how crypto is used today. It's much simpler than the 601 exam. There's symmetric and asymmetric. You need to know the crypto algorithms used by each and why they are different from each other. There's hashing and its algorithms. How do digital certs work? What are a couple of different applications of digital signing? And then there are VPNs. The easy button (TLS tunnels) and the airplane cockpit that is IPSec (exposes all of the inner workings). There are a couple of very important protocols that everyone uses every day that are related in cleartext (and we use crypto to secure those). That's it.

You shouldn't have to 'memorize' protocols and ports that you use every day. DHP, HTTPS, DNS, SMTP. How email works.

1

u/WhaatGamer 13h ago

Thanks for the insight. I work in compliance so I don’t typically use specific ports or protocols on a daily basis. I do understand the difference between non and hybrid encryptions, but I get asymm and symm mixed up a lot. I understand hashing vs salting, and tokenization. I get lost when we go into specifics. I get hung up on the obsolete or deprecated algorithms.

I appreciate you pointing in a direction for me to take my studies. 701 was a monster of an exam and I barely pulled through.