Exam Objectives

CompTIA goes to great lengths to ensure that their certification programs accurately reflect the IT industry's best practices. They do this by establishing Cornerstone committees for each of their exam programs. Each committee is comprised of a small group of IT professionals, training providers, and publishers who are responsible for establishing the exam's baseline competency level and who determine the appropriate target audience level. Once these factors are determined, CompTIA shares this information with a group of hand-selected Subject Matter Experts, more commonly called SME's. These folks are the true brainpower behind the certification program. In the case of this exam, they are IT-seasoned pros from the likes of Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Verisign, and RSA Security, just to name a few. They review the committee's findings, refine them, and shape them into the objectives you see before you. CompTIA calls this process a Job Task Analysis (JTA). Finally, CompTIA conducts a survey to ensure that the objectives and weightings are indeed truly reflective of the job requirements. Only then can the SME's go to work writing the hundreds of questions needed for the exam. And, in many cases, they have to go back to the drawing board for further refinements before the exam is ready to go live in its final state. So, rest assured the content you are about to learn will serve you long after you take the exam.

Note 

Exam objectives are subject to change at any time without prior notice and at CompTIA's sole discretion. Please visit the certification page of CompTIA's website at www.comptia.org for the most current listing of exam objectives.

CompTIA also publishes relative weightings for each of the exam's objectives. The following table lists the five Security+ objective domains and the extent to which they are represented on the actual exam. For example, expect to spend more time answering a few more questions that pertain to authentication from the first domain, General Security Concepts, rather than questions on algorithms from the fourth domain, Basics of Cryptography. As you use this study guide, you will find that we have tried to administer just the right dosage of objective knowledge to you by tailoring our coverage to mirror the percentages that CompTIA uses.

Domain	% of Exam
1.0 General Security Concepts	30%
2.0 Communication Security	20%
3.0 Infrastructure Security	20%
4.0 Basics of Cryptography	15%
5.0 Operational/Organizational Security	15%
Total	100%