Practice tests · 50 items

Network Security & Protocols practice test

Where attackers sit on a network and what each position gives them: MITM and ARP spoofing, DNS attacks and DNSSEC, TCP and SYN floods, HSTS and SSL stripping, TLS troubleshooting, interception proxies and pinning, segmentation and egress control, VPNs and zero-trust access, email authentication, Wi-Fi, DDoS, BGP and network detection. The pool for this topic holds 15 easy, 27 medium and 8 hard items. Each answer comes with its reasoning and a link to the question or concept page it was drawn from.

Configure a test

Topic

Difficulty

Questions

15 in this pool · about 7 min

Reveal answers

Sample items with answers

easy · sample

Which property of TLS is what actually defeats a man-in-the-middle who has diverted your traffic?

Encryption, because the attacker cannot read the ciphertext they relay between the two endpoints

✓Server authentication: the attacker cannot prove possession of a key for a trusted certificate

Compression, which makes intercepted traffic too large to store

The TCP checksum, which detects modified packets

Encryption to the wrong party protects nothing; confidentiality and integrity depend on the client verifying it is talking to the real server. An attacker in position can relay bytes but cannot produce the CertificateVerify signature for a certificate the client trusts.

easy · sample

What does a SYN flood exhaust on the target server?

✓Its table of half-open connections waiting for the final ACK

Its disk space, by forcing the server to log every SYN packet it receives

Its TLS session cache, because every SYN starts a handshake

Its memory for completed HTTP requests

Each SYN makes the server keep state for a half-open connection and retransmit SYN-ACKs; spoofed sources never complete the handshake. SYN cookies let the server keep no state until a valid ACK returns.

After the test

Choosing from options is easier than reasoning it out in front of a panel. These pages make you reason it out: