(How are limits managed for the number of bitcoins that can be created and stored in a blockchain?)
Correct Answer: A
Bitcoin's supply is controlled by protocol rules enforced by consensus: new bitcoins enter circulation through the block subsidy awarded to miners for producing valid blocks. This subsidy is programmed to halve at fixed intervals (every 210,000 blocks), which steadily reduces the rate of new coin creation over time and asymptotically approaches a capped total supply (commonly cited as 21 million BTC). This mechanism is often called the halving schedule and is the primary way limits are managed. The number of participants is not fixed; anyone can run a node or mine. There is no per-country cap and no per-person maximum enforced by the protocol-addresses and ownership are not limited that way. The supply cap emerges from the decreasing issuance schedule combined with consensus validation rules that reject blocks creating coins beyond what the schedule allows. Therefore, the correct answer is that limits are managed because rewards for mining reduce over time.
Question 2
(What makes the RC4 cipher unique compared to RC5 and RC6?)
Correct Answer: A
RC4 is unique among the RC family listed because it is a stream cipher. It generates a pseudorandom keystream and encrypts data by XORing that keystream with plaintext bytes (and decryption is the same XOR operation). This differs from RC5 and RC6, which are block ciphers: they encrypt fixed-size blocks of data through multiple rounds of operations (such as modular addition, XOR, and rotations) using a secret key. The stream-cipher design means RC4 historically fit protocols where data arrives continuously (e.g., early wireless and web encryption) and where simple, fast software implementation was desired. However, stream ciphers demand careful handling of nonces/IVs to avoid keystream reuse; reuse can catastrophically leak plaintext relationships. RC4 also has well-documented statistical biases in its keystream, leading to practical attacks in protocols like WEP and later concerns in TLS, which is why RC4 has been deprecated in modern security standards. Still, from a classification standpoint, "stream" is the distinguishing characteristic versus RC5/RC6 being block ciphers.
Question 3
(What is an alternative to using a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) with certificates?)
Correct Answer: B
OCSP is the primary online alternative to CRLs for checking whether a certificate has been revoked. With a CRL, a relying party periodically downloads a list of revoked certificate serial numbers published by the issuing CA (or CRL distribution point). That approach can be bandwidth-heavy, introduces latency between revocation and client awareness, and can result in clients using stale revocation data if updates are infrequent. OCSP improves this by allowing a client (or a server on the client's behalf) to query an OCSP responder in near real time about the status of a specific certificate (good, revoked, or unknown). In practice, many TLS deployments use OCSP stapling, where the server periodically fetches a signed OCSP response from the CA's responder and "staples" it to the TLS handshake, reducing client-side network calls and improving privacy (the CA doesn't learn which site the client is visiting). Thus, OCSP provides a more timely, certificate-specific revocation status mechanism than CRLs while preserving the CA's signed assurance.
Question 4
(How are limits managed for the number of bitcoins that can be created and stored in a blockchain?)
Correct Answer: A
Bitcoin's supply is controlled by protocol rules enforced by consensus: new bitcoins enter circulation through the block subsidy awarded to miners for producing valid blocks. This subsidy is programmed to halve at fixed intervals (every 210,000 blocks), which steadily reduces the rate of new coin creation over time and asymptotically approaches a capped total supply (commonly cited as 21 million BTC). This mechanism is often called the halving schedule and is the primary way limits are managed. The number of participants is not fixed; anyone can run a node or mine. There is no per-country cap and no per-person maximum enforced by the protocol-addresses and ownership are not limited that way. The supply cap emerges from the decreasing issuance schedule combined with consensus validation rules that reject blocks creating coins beyond what the schedule allows. Therefore, the correct answer is that limits are managed because rewards for mining reduce over time.
Question 5
(A Linux user password is identified as follows: $2a$08$AbCh0RCM8p8FGaYvRLI0H.Kng54gcnWCOQYIhas708UEZRQQjGBh4 Which hash algorithm should be used to salt this password?)
Correct Answer: D
The string format $2a$08$... is a well-known identifier for the bcrypt password hashing scheme. In common password-hash notation, the prefix indicates the algorithm and parameters: "$2a$" denotes bcrypt (version 2a), and "08" indicates the cost factor (work factor) controlling how computationally expensive hashing is. bcrypt is designed specifically for password storage: it includes a built-in salt and is intentionally slow and adaptive, making brute-force and GPU attacks far more expensive than fast general-purpose hashes like MD5 or SHA-512. NTLM and MD5 are obsolete for secure password storage due to speed and known weaknesses. SHA-512, while cryptographically strong as a hash, is still too fast for password hashing unless used in a dedicated password-hashing construction (e.g., PBKDF2, scrypt, Argon2) with appropriate parameters and salts. Since the given hash clearly matches bcrypt's encoding, the correct algorithm is bcrypt, which incorporates salting and cost-based key stretching as part of its design.