I want to take this, I'm just worried(couple questions)

nevolved

There seems to be such a huge amount of information to cover for this exam. I'm having trouble with only a couple of things.

S/MIME: Asymmetric encryption (somewhere said RSA), the header does not get encrypted
PGP: Asymmetric and Sym (not sure about the sym, thats what a book said though, why is it?), encrypts the data and header

IPSEC: Asymmetric(using certificates?) and Symmet (shared secret)...ok symmetric because after IKE the hosts set up a shared secret that they use

Can you help me with the above statements? Thanks

dynamik

It might help you to research PKI and certificates a bit more (Wikipedia is a great place to start). Anything that uses certificates is going to be asymmetric since a public and private key are involved. Anything that involves putting in the same information, such as a password, at both ends of the communication is going to be symmetric. A lot of encryption technologies support both for convenience.

You should also be able to differentiate between ESP and AH when talking about IPSec. That's an important distinction to make.

cpohlad

Also,
In the practice tests (the 40 question one) there is an explanation of S/MIME:

Only the data portion of the message is encrypted, the header is left intact so mailserver can read addresssing information and forward and deliver the message accordingly. A symmetric key algorithm is used to encrypt the data. The symmetric key is in turn encrypted by using the recipient's public key and an asymmetric algorithm.

Kasor

relax... always ask yourself that did you cover and study everything according the certification content. If you do and do well on the practice, then you should be fine.