CDPSE Technical Privacy Controls 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A web application encodes user-submitted data before rendering it in the browser. Which privacy-relevant attack does this primarily prevent?
- SQL injection
- Cross-site scripting (XSS) (Correct answer)
- Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)
- Clickjacking
Correct answer: Cross-site scripting (XSS)
Output encoding prevents XSS by ensuring user-supplied content is treated as data rather than executable script, protecting session cookies and personal data from theft.
Question 2: Which TLS configuration setting most directly reduces the risk of exposing personal data if a server's long-term private key is later compromised?
- Certificate pinning
- Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) (Correct answer)
- OCSP stapling
- Extended Validation (EV) certificates
Correct answer: Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS)
Perfect Forward Secrecy uses ephemeral session keys so that compromising the server's private key cannot decrypt previously recorded sessions.
Question 3: An organization implements a Content Security Policy (CSP) header. Which privacy threat does this primarily mitigate?
- Third-party tracking scripts loading unauthorized resources (Correct answer)
- Insecure direct object references to personal records
- Brute-force attacks on user passwords
- Unencrypted transmission of cookies
Correct answer: Third-party tracking scripts loading unauthorized resources
CSP restricts which sources can load scripts and resources, preventing unauthorized third-party trackers or data-exfiltration scripts from executing.
Question 4: A CDPSE candidate is reviewing an API that returns full user objects including SSN and date of birth even when only the username is needed. Which privacy principle is violated?
- Purpose limitation
- Data minimization (Correct answer)
- Storage limitation
- Integrity and confidentiality
Correct answer: Data minimization
Returning more personal data than the consuming application needs violates data minimization, which requires collecting and exposing only data adequate and relevant for the specified purpose.
Question 5: What is the technical function of a 'salt' when hashing passwords for storage?
- It encrypts the hash output to prevent dictionary attacks
- It increases the hash digest length for stronger collision resistance
- It is a random value prepended to the password before hashing to defeat precomputed rainbow tables (Correct answer)
- It iterates the hash function thousands of times to slow brute-force
Correct answer: It is a random value prepended to the password before hashing to defeat precomputed rainbow tables
A salt is a unique random value added to each password before hashing, ensuring identical passwords produce different hashes and rendering precomputed rainbow tables useless.
Question 6: Which storage-level control protects personal data on a laptop against disclosure if the device is stolen?
- Transport Layer Security (TLS)
- Full-disk encryption (FDE) (Correct answer)
- Database-level row security
- Log redaction
Correct answer: Full-disk encryption (FDE)
Full-disk encryption renders data on a stolen device unreadable without the decryption key, protecting personal data against physical access attacks.
Question 7: A privacy engineer needs to prevent internal analysts from seeing raw PII in a production database while still enabling query-based analytics. Which control is MOST appropriate?
- Encrypting the entire database with AES-256
- Dynamic data masking that substitutes real values at query time for unauthorized users (Correct answer)
- Restricting all database access to a single service account
- Anonymizing the entire database before every analyst query
Correct answer: Dynamic data masking that substitutes real values at query time for unauthorized users
Dynamic data masking presents masked values to unauthorized users at query time without altering the underlying stored data, balancing utility and privacy.
CDPSE Technical Privacy Controls 3
A web application encodes user-submitted data before rendering it in the browser.
Which privacy-relevant attack does this primarily prevent?