CISSP Security Architecture 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) in Common Criteria represents 'structurally tested' and is the most common for commercial products seeking formal evaluation?
- EAL1
- EAL4 (Correct answer)
- EAL6
- EAL7
Correct answer: EAL4
EAL4 (methodically designed, tested, and reviewed) is the highest level typically economically feasible for commercial products.
Question 2: A covert channel in a secure system is best described as:
- An encrypted tunnel used to bypass firewall rules
- A communication path that was not intended for information transfer but can leak data (Correct answer)
- A backdoor installed by a malicious developer
- An out-of-band management interface for administrators
Correct answer: A communication path that was not intended for information transfer but can leak data
Covert channels exploit unintended communication paths — such as timing or storage — to exfiltrate information in violation of security policy.
Question 3: In a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which component is primarily responsible for routing messages between services and enforcing security policies?
- Service registry
- Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
- API gateway (Correct answer)
- Load balancer
Correct answer: API gateway
An API gateway enforces authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and other security policies for services in an SOA or microservices environment.
Question 4: Which threat modeling methodology uses attack trees to enumerate potential attack paths against a system?
- STRIDE
- PASTA
- VAST
- Attack tree analysis (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Attack tree analysis
Attack tree analysis visually represents attack paths as a tree structure, with the root being the attacker's goal and leaves being specific attack methods.
Question 5: What is the primary purpose of a security architecture review board?
- To approve individual user access requests
- To ensure new systems and changes align with the enterprise security architecture (Correct answer)
- To respond to security incidents and coordinate remediation
- To perform penetration testing on production systems
Correct answer: To ensure new systems and changes align with the enterprise security architecture
A security architecture review board evaluates proposed systems and changes against established architectural standards before implementation.
Question 6: Which security model defines a formal state machine and requires that the system always transitions to a secure state?
- Information Flow model
- Noninterference model
- State machine model (Correct answer)
- Take-Grant model
Correct answer: State machine model
The State Machine model defines all allowable system states and ensures every transition moves the system from one secure state to another.
Question 7: A security architect is designing a system where users can perform actions but cannot grant those permissions to others. Which access control property does this implement?
- Mandatory access control
- Principle of confinement
- Attenuation of privilege (Correct answer)
- Role explosion prevention
Correct answer: Attenuation of privilege
Attenuation of privilege (also called the principle of attenuation) ensures subjects cannot grant permissions greater than or equal to their own to others.
CISSP Security Architecture 5
Which Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) in Common Criteria represents 'structurally tested' and is the most common for commercial products seeking formal evaluation?