Use this quick start guide to collect all the information about F5 BIG-IP ASM Specialist (303) Certification exam. This study guide provides a list of objectives and resources that will help you prepare for items on the 303 F5 BIG-IP ASM Specialist exam. The Sample Questions will help you identify the type and difficulty level of the questions and the Practice Exams will make you familiar with the format and environment of an exam. You should refer this guide carefully before attempting your actual F5 BIG-IP ASM certification exam.
The F5 BIG-IP ASM Specialist certification is mainly targeted to those candidates who want to build their career in Specialist domain. The F5 Certified Technology Specialist - BIG-IP Application Security Manager (F5-CTS ASM) exam verifies that the candidate possesses the fundamental knowledge and proven skills in the area of F5 BIG-IP ASM.
F5 BIG-IP ASM Specialist Exam Summary:
| Exam Name | F5 Certified Technology Specialist - BIG-IP Application Security Manager (F5-CTS ASM) |
| Exam Code | 303 |
| Exam Price | $180 (USD) |
| Duration | 90 mins |
| Number of Questions | 80 |
| Passing Score | 245 / 350 |
| Books / Training | F5 Training Programs |
| Schedule Exam | Pearson VUE |
| Sample Questions | F5 BIG-IP ASM Specialist Sample Questions |
| Practice Exam | F5 303 Certification Practice Exam |
F5 303 Exam Syllabus Topics:
| Topic | Details |
|---|---|
ARCHITECTURE/DESIGN AND POLICY CREATION |
|
| Explain the potential effects of common attacks on web applications |
- Understand and describe how the ASM can affect clients and applications directly while in either transparent or blocking mode |
| Explain how specific security policies mitigate various web application attacks |
- Understand/interpret an iRule or LTM policy to map application traffic to an ASM policy - Explain the trade-offs between security, manageability, false positives, and performance |
| Determine the appropriate policy features and granularity for a given set of requirements | - Understand application (security) requirements and convert requirements to technical tasks |
| Determine which deployment method is most appropriate for a given set of requirements | - Determine which deployment method is most appropriate given the circumstances (web services, vulnerability scanner, templates, rapid deployment model) |
| Explain the automatic policy builder lifecycle |
- Create any profiles required to support the policy deployment (xml, JSON, logging profiles) - Implement anomaly detection appropriate to the web app (D/Dos protection, brute force attack, web scraping, proactive bot defense) |
| Review and evaluate policy settings based on information gathered from ASM (attack signatures, DataGuard, entities) | - Configure initial policy building settings (automatic policy builder settings) |
| Define appropriate policy structure for policy elements | - Define appropriate policy structure for policy elements (URLs, parameters, file types, headers, sessions & logins, content profiles, CSRF protection, anomaly detection, DataGuard, proactive bot defense) |
| Explain options and potential results within the deployment wizard |
- Describe options within the deployment wizard (deployment method, attack signatures, virtual server, learning method - Select the appropriate ASM deployment model given the business requirements |
| Explain available logging options | - Explain the specifications of the remote logger (ports, types of logs, formats, address) |
| Describe the management of the attack signature lifecycle and select the appropriate attack signatures or signature sets | - Understand management of attack signature lifecycle (staging, enforcement readiness period) and select appropriate attack signatures or signature sets. |
POLICY MAINTENANCE AND OPTIMIZATION |
|
| Evaluate the implications of changes in the policy to the security and functionality of the application | - Evaluate whether the rules are being implemented effectively and appropriately to meet security and/or compliance requirements and make changes as appropriate |
| Explain the process to integrate natively supported third party vulnerability scan output and generic formats with ASM |
- Refine appropriate policy structure for policy elements (URLs, parameters, file types, headers, sessions & logins, content profiles, CSRF protection, anomaly protection). - Explain how to manage policies using import, export, merge, and revert |
| Evaluate whether rules are being implemented effectively and appropriately to mitigate violations | - Evaluate the implications of changes in the policy to the security and vulnerabilities of the application |
| Determine how a policy should be adjusted based upon available data | - Tune an ASM policy for better performance, including use of wildcards to improve efficiency |
| Define the ASM policy management functions |
- Identify the status of the policy - Define the violation types that exist in ASM - Describe how to merge and differentiate between policies |
REVIEW EVENT LOGS AND MITIGATE ATTACKS |
|
| Interpret log entries and identify opportunities to refine the policy |
- Examine traffic violations, determine if any attack traffic was permitted through the ASM and modify the policy to remove false positives - Locate and interpret reported security violations by end users and application developers |
| Given an ASM report, identify trends in support of security objectives. |
- Understand and describe each major violation category and how ASM detects common exploits - Generate reporting for the ASM system and review the contents of the reports (anomaly statistics, charts, requests, PCI compliance status) |
| Determine the appropriate mitigation for a given attack or vulnerability |
- Take appropriate action on reported security violations by end users and application developers - Modify ASM policy to adapt to attacks |
| Decide the appropriate method for determining the success of attack mitigation | - Choose an appropriate user defined attack signature to respond to particular traffic |
TROUBLESHOOT |
|
| Evaluate ASM policy performance issues and determine appropriate mitigation strategies | - Analyze performance graphs and statistics along with ASM configurations to determine the root cause of performance issues and appropriate remediation to the configuration based on guaranteed logging |
| Understand the impact of learning, alarm, and blocking settings on traffic enforcement | - Ensure that the security policy is inspecting web application traffic (application is functional and the policies are parsing the traffic) |
| Examine policy objects to determine why traffic is or is not generating violations | - Examine Security event logs and ASM configurations to determine expected violations based on the logging profile assigned to the virtual server |
| Identify and interpret ASM performance metrics |
- Understand the impact of ASM iRules on performance. - Understand the impact of traffic spikes on ASM performance and available mitigation strategies |
| Evaluate ASM system performance issues and determine appropriate mitigation strategies | - Correlate performance issues with ASM policy changes based on security policy history information and system performance graphs |
| Recognize ASM specific user roles and their permissions |
- Recognize differences between user roles/permissions - Recognize ASM specific user roles |
To ensure success in F5 BIG-IP ASM certification exam, we recommend authorized training course, practice test and hands-on experience to prepare for F5 BIG-IP ASM Specialist (303) exam.