CNSP Certification study guide
CNSP Certification · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The CNSP (Certified Network Security Practitioner) is a certification offered by The SecOps Group, a CREST-accredited security consultancy and education provider. According to the SecOps Group website, their exams provide 'an authentic and credible certification program that is up-to-date and represents real life business risks.' The CNSP is designed for security professionals who want to validate their practical skills in network and application security. The CNSP Certification study guide has 8 sections and about 2,621 words.
01Web Application Security
Web Application Security tests whether you can trace untrusted input from a request to a security-sensitive sink and whether you understand where authorization, session handling, and output encoding actually belong. The exam favors concrete mechanics over memorized category names.
378 words, about 2 min02Internal Network Security
Internal Network Security assumes an attacker already has a foothold and tests discovery, credential abuse, segmentation, Active Directory, and lateral movement. The exam rewards attack-path reasoning over raw port counts.
328 words, about 2 min03External Network Security
External Network Security covers the internet-facing attack surface: DNS, certificates, edge devices, remote access, email authentication, and exposed services. The exam tests discovery discipline and the difference between a finding and a real exposure.
328 words, about 2 min04Mobile Application Security
Mobile Application Security tests Android and iOS client weaknesses and the server-side assumptions behind them. Expect MASVS-style areas: storage, cryptography, transport, authentication, platform interaction, and resilience.
320 words, about 2 min05Source-Code Analysis
Source-Code Analysis tests white-box review and SAST interpretation: can you find a taint path, judge whether a sanitizer is effective, and distinguish a real vulnerability from a pattern match? Taint analysis tracks sources such as request parameters, headers, files, and queues to sinks such as SQL execution, OS commands, template rendering, deserialization, and redirects.
328 words, about 2 min06Cloud Security
Cloud Security tests identity, storage, network, logging, and metadata exposure in cloud environments. The shared responsibility model means the provider secures the platform, while the customer secures configuration, identity, and data.
318 words, about 2 min07Red Team Assessment
Red Team Assessment tests objective-driven adversary emulation under rules of engagement. It is not a vulnerability scan with a different name; the exam looks for scoping, operational security, attack-path thinking, and evidence quality.
302 words, about 2 min08AI/ML Security
AI/ML Security covers threats to models, data, pipelines, and applications built on them, especially LLM systems with tools and retrieval. The exam tests whether you can separate model behavior from security controls.
319 words, about 2 min