EC-Council CASE study guide
EC-Council CASE · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Certified Application Security Engineer (CASE Java) is an EC-Council credential aimed at Java developers with at least two years of experience, plus anyone moving into an application security engineer, analyst, or tester role. Its stated scope is broader than secure coding guidelines: the ten-module program covers security activities across the whole software development life cycle - planning, requirements, design, coding, testing, and deployment. The EC-Council CASE study guide has 10 sections and about 3,633 words.
01Understanding Application Security, Threats, and Attacks
This domain tests whether you can identify an application's assets, the actors and conditions that endanger them, and the controls that reduce exposure. Expect questions that separate a threat from a vulnerability and a risk, and that ask you to choose a control appropriate to a specific attack class.
388 words, about 2 min02Security Requirements Gathering
This domain tests how to turn business and security expectations into requirements that can be designed, built, and verified. The exam favors requirements with measurable acceptance criteria over slogans.
340 words, about 2 min03Secure Application Security Design and Architecture
This domain tests secure design principles and how architecture choices create or remove risk. Questions often ask you to select a control that enforces a principle across trust boundaries rather than patch a single endpoint.
372 words, about 2 min04Secure Coding Practices for Input Validation
This domain tests whether you can constrain untrusted input before it reaches sensitive operations. The exam distinguishes validation from output encoding and expects server-side enforcement.
345 words, about 2 min05Secure Coding Practices for Authentication and Authorization
This domain tests identity proofing and access enforcement. The exam expects you to keep authentication, authorization, and session state separate and to enforce access decisions on the server.
361 words, about 2 min06Secure Coding Practices for Cryptography
This domain tests correct use of cryptography for confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and password storage. The exam rewards standard primitives and key management over custom schemes.
368 words, about 2 min07Secure Coding Practices for Session Management
This domain tests how an application maintains authenticated state without letting an attacker hijack, fixate, or replay it. The exam focuses on token entropy, cookie handling, lifecycle events, and server-side enforcement.
367 words, about 2 min08Secure Coding Practices for Error Handling
This domain tests how the application behaves when something fails and what it reveals. The exam expects failures to be safe, useful to operators, and opaque to attackers.
352 words, about 2 min09Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing (SAST & DAST)
This domain tests how SAST and DAST find different classes of weaknesses and why neither proves an application is secure. Expect questions on placement in the lifecycle, coverage, triage, and false results.
389 words, about 2 min10Secure Deployment and Maintenance
This domain tests whether security survives release and operations. The exam expects hardened environments, protected secrets, controlled pipelines, dependency management, monitoring, and patching.
351 words, about 2 min