CCSP Questions Bank

The most common and efficient manner of securing operating systems is through the use of baselines. A baseline is a standardized and understood set of base configurations and settings. When a new system is built or a new virtual machine is established, baselines will be applied to a new image to ensure the base configuration meets organizational policy and regulatory requirements.

Cloud environments depend heavily on API calls for management and automation. Any vulnerability with the APIs can cause significant risk and exposure to all tenants of the cloud environment. Resource pooling and elasticity could both be impacted by insecure APIs, as both require automation and orchestration to operate properly, but automation is the better answer here. Redundancy would not be directly impacted by insecure APIs.

Authentication goes a step further than identification by providing a means for proving an entity's identification. Authentication is most commonly done through mechanisms such as passwords. Identification involves ascertaining who the entity is, but without a means of proving it, such as a name or user ID. Authorization occurs after authentication and sets access permissions and other privileges within a system or application for the user. Proofing is not a term that is relevant to the question.

WAFs detect how the application interacts with the environment, so they are optimal for detecting and refuting things like SQL injection and XSS. Password cracking, syn floods, and ransomware usually aren’t taking place in the same way as injection and XSS, and they are better addressed with controls at the router and through the use of HIDS, NIDS, and antimalware tools.