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Rocheston’s RCCE pairs a five-day, lab-heavy course with a 100-question exam that puts 40% of its weight on assessing risks, threats and vulnerabilities. This guide covers the exam as it stands in October 2026, the four domains and their weights, who can sit it, what it costs, how renewal works, and exactly what Rocheston says about ANAB accreditation and DoD 8140.
RCCE is the flagship certification of the Rocheston Department of Certification (RDoC), and Rocheston has run the exam since 2019.
It’s aimed at cybersecurity engineers, the people who secure an organization’s networks, systems, programs and data against unauthorized access. The exam tests four domains, from policy and governance through incident response and recovery. The training that leads to it is built around hands-on labs in Rose OS, a Linux-based lab environment Rocheston developed itself.
Rocheston states that RCCE is accredited by ANAB under ISO/IEC 17024 and approved under DoD 8140. The certification is issued and maintained by Rocheston through the RDoC, and the exam runs on Ramsys, the online proctoring system Rocheston built for it.
Encryption, access control and secure coding that keep assets safe before an attack.
Watch traffic and logs with IDS, network analysis tools and threat intelligence.
Work a defined incident response plan, with a CSIRT and a clear communication plan.
Find the root cause with digital forensics, malware analysis and reverse engineering.
Four things worth knowing about RCCE before you weigh it against other security certifications.
RCCE training runs inside Rose OS, a Linux-based lab environment Rocheston developed, which its Level 1 page says carries 1.2 TB of preloaded tools. The Level 1 course lists 12 guided labs, from reconnaissance and web application testing to an incident response simulation, and closes with a cyber range capstone that produces a vulnerability report, an incident response summary, a risk register and an executive summary.
The course is full of attack tools, but the exam blueprint leans toward risk. Risks/Threats/Vulnerability Assessment alone is 40%, and risk management adds another 26%. Budget study time for risk work as well as tool practice.
The exam is delivered online through Rocheston Ramsys, the remote proctoring system Rocheston built, working alongside its Cyberclass platform. Rocheston says you can test on a Mac, an iPad or a Windows device.
Rocheston states that RCCE is accredited by ANAB under ISO/IEC 17024, and that the U.S. Government officially recognizes and approves it under the DoD 8140 directive. Its DoD 8140 page lists 15 job roles, among them Cyber Defense Analyst, Cyber Defense Incident Responder, Vulnerability Assessment Analyst and Secure Software Assessor.
Training Camp couldn’t check the official matrix directly for this guide, so treat the role list as Rocheston’s claim. If you need RCCE for a specific work role and proficiency level, confirm it on the current qualification matrix at the DoD Cyber Exchange before you register.
The certification, the exam and renewal, as Rocheston publishes them in October 2026.
Rocheston runs RCCE as a three-level program in 2026. Level 1 is the core credential and the exam this guide covers. Levels 2 and 3 are five-day advanced programs that build on it.
The core credential. A five-day, 25-module course on Rose OS, then a 100-question exam with 120 minutes and a 62% passing score. Rocheston calls Level 1 beginner-friendly for people who already have basic IT knowledge.
Advanced penetration testing and red team versus blue team work on a cyber range of more than 100 machines, following Rocheston’s RCPT methodology and ending in the JuggyBank banking capstone. Its exam is 100 questions over 2 hours with a 70% passing score, and Rocheston asks for Level 1 or equivalent first.
A five-day course in AI-driven attack and defense using Rocheston’s Zelfire suite and its AINA AI agent. Rocheston lists no separate exam. It awards the Level 3 certification when you complete the course, and it recommends Level 2 or equivalent practical experience first.
Rocheston pitches RCCE Level 1 at people who already know basic networking, operating systems and the command line. For anyone without that, it suggests its RCT foundation course first. Here’s how RCCE sits next to the certifications people usually hold before and after it.
Build the baseline
The hands-on core
Two questions to answer before you commit: can you take the exam, and should you take RCCE specifically. Here’s a straight answer to both.
You can self-study and apply directly.
Submit Rocheston’s RCCE exam application with a letter from your supervisor or employer confirming two years of experience in the cybersecurity industry. A Program Officer checks the documents, Rocheston says you’ll hear whether you’re accepted within 14 days, and a payment link follows once you’re approved. A proctor then sends you a scheduling link.
Authorized training makes you eligible.
Attend RCCE training from a Rocheston Authorized Training Provider and you receive a Certificate of Attendance at the end, which meets the eligibility rule on its own. Training Camp’s RCCE boot camp is official Rocheston training with the exam voucher included, so you can apply and sit the exam once class ends.
Rocheston lists these among the roles RCCE Level 1 helps prepare candidates for. Each card notes the part of the exam or course that maps to the work.
Watches alerts, reads logs and packet captures, and escalates what looks wrong. RCCE’s modules on log management and network analyzers, firewalls and IDS, and incident response line up with a SOC analyst’s daily queue.
Runs scheduled scans, validates findings and ranks them for remediation. Risks/Threats/Vulnerability Assessment is 40% of the RCCE exam, and Vulnerability Assessment Analyst is one of the job roles on Rocheston’s DoD 8140 list.
Handles first response when something goes wrong, preserves evidence and helps restore operations. The fourth RCCE domain, worth 16%, covers incident classification, evidence handling and recovery planning.
Configures and tunes firewalls, IDS and IPS, and reads traffic for signs of attack. RCCE gives whole modules to firewalls, packet analysis, wireless security and denial of service.
Maintains policy, runs risk assessments and tracks mitigation plans. Policies and governance plus risk management make up 44% of the RCCE exam, a large share of the blueprint for a course this lab-heavy.
Builds and hardens the systems the other roles defend: cloud accounts, zero-trust designs, patch processes and virtualized infrastructure. Rocheston names Security Engineer Associate among the roles RCCE Level 1 prepares for.
Candidates usually weigh RCCE against CEH and CompTIA Security+. Here’s how the published facts line up.
| RCCE | CEH | CompTIA Security+ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Issuer | Rocheston | EC-Council | CompTIA |
| Exam Format | 100 multiple-choice, 120 min | 125 multiple-choice over 4 hours | Up to 90 multiple-choice + PBQ, 90 min |
| Passing Score | 62% | 60% to 85% (varies by exam form) | 750 (scale of 100 to 900) |
| Level | Foundation / intermediate (Rocheston’s label) | Intermediate | Foundational |
| Focus | Lab-based training, exam weighted toward risk | Broad methodology and tool coverage | Broad, vendor-neutral core security |
| Exam Cost | $499 | ~$1,199 | ~$439 |
| Renewal | 100 RCE credits over 2 years | 120 ECE credits over 3 years + annual fee | 50 CEUs over 3 years |
| DoD 8140 Approved | Stated by Rocheston | Yes | Yes |
| Best For | Lab-first learners heading for Rocheston’s Level 2 and 3 | Broad credential recognition, career entry | Career entry and DoD baseline recognition |
CEH and Security+ facts are taken from the Training Camp guides for CEH and Security+. RCCE facts come from Rocheston’s candidate handbook, exam policy and exam brochure.
Certification Matchups puts the published facts, strengths and weak spots of two certifications side by side.
Our official Rocheston RCCE boot camp runs five days, live and instructor-led, in person or online. You work from Rocheston’s courseware with hands-on labs in Rose OS, practice questions and exam prep, and your RCCE Level 1 exam voucher is included.
DoD 8140, study strategy, and the hands-on skills the RCCE course covers.
How a certification gets onto the DoD 8140 qualification matrix: ANAB accreditation under ISO/IEC 17024 first, then a 70 percent alignment score against each DCWF work role. Useful background for reading any vendor’s 8140 claim, Rocheston’s included.
A practical map of DoD 8140 work role codes and proficiency levels, and why the right certification depends on your role rather than on one list of approved names.
How to read an official exam outline, what the domain weights tell you about where to spend study time, and why the verbs in each objective matter.
SYN, connect, UDP and IP protocol scans compared, with when each one fits. Port scanning comes up in RCCE’s reconnaissance module, and Nmap in its hacking frameworks module.
Why security study feels hard (the volume of material, the way questions are written, and finding the hours around a full-time job) and what helps.
The vocabulary that trips up new security students, from threat versus vulnerability to authentication versus authorization, and a way of studying it that sticks.
What hiring managers weigh for penetration testing roles, and where a certification helps compared with hands-on experience and other credentials.
The RCCE exam brochure splits the exam into four domains, and each badge shows that domain’s share of the exam. Risks/Threats/Vulnerability Assessment carries 40% on its own, so it deserves the biggest share of your study time. Click any domain for what it covers.
Writing and enforcing security policy, aligning it with standards such as NIST, taking part in security audits and awareness training, and giving security input during the software development lifecycle. Rocheston’s objectives also cover revising policy after an incident so the same failure doesn’t happen twice. At 18%, it’s the second smallest domain.
The heaviest domain by a wide margin. It covers identifying and prioritizing risks, threats and vulnerabilities, scheduled vulnerability scans, penetration tests, software security analysis, threat intelligence research and reporting changes to stakeholders. Much of the hands-on course material, from reconnaissance to vulnerability scanners, lines up with this domain. The brochure calls it Risk Assessment.
What happens after the assessment: risk and threat action plans, mitigation planning, firewall and IDS/IPS configuration and hardening, zero-day threats, vendor and third-party risk, and following up with other departments until fixes are in place. The brochure calls it Risk Management.
Defining and classifying incidents, first response to a breach, collecting and preserving evidence, business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and feeding what was learned back into the SOC. The brochure titles it Implement Security Incident Response and Recovery Plan.
Rocheston’s Level 1 course groups 25 modules into five tracks, and the RDoC lists a near-identical set of 27 technical areas that the exam draws on. Each badge shows the module’s track.
Threat actors and their motives, security controls and defense in depth, ransomware, phishing and insider attacks, and the risks that come with mobile devices, IoT, cloud and social networks.
Vulnerability types, the hacking lifecycle and zero-days, vulnerability scanners such as Nessus, threat intelligence feeds, and security audits against the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and the CMMC model.
Footprinting and OSINT tools such as Maltego and theHarvester, the OSI and TCP/IP models, subnetting, DNS and port scanning, plus the machine learning side: face detection, deepfakes and object detection with TensorFlow.
How attacks on web applications work, including SQL injection with SQLmap, CSRF, clickjacking and file inclusion, practiced against DVWA and OWASP Mutillidae, with web application firewalls and secure coding as the defense.
Docker and Kubernetes basics, web shells and Netcat, phishing campaigns, Trojans and backdoors, command and control with the Empire framework, keyloggers, steganography and ransomware.
How DoS and DDoS attacks work, from SYN floods and HTTP floods to DNS amplification and low and slow attacks, the role of botnets and IP spoofing, and DDoS mitigation.
The Metasploit Framework end to end: its databases, commands, payload types and handlers, port scanning with Nmap, and importing Nessus scan results for further analysis.
Android sandboxing, the Dalvik VM and the ART runtime, rooting, and using Metasploit and the Genymotion emulator for testing, including injecting Meterpreter into an existing APK.
Wi-Fi bands and channels, WPA2 versus WPA3, rogue access points, packet injection and password cracking with the Aircrack-ng suite, Bluetooth scanning and Wi-Fi heatmaps.
Ethernet addressing and ARP, packet capture with Wireshark and tcpdump, NetFlow analysis, and spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks run with tools such as Bettercap.
Packet filtering, stateful and next-generation firewalls, open-source firewalls such as pfSense and iptables, cloud firewalls like AWS WAF, and the tunneling techniques attackers use to get past them.
Analyzing samples with antivirus tools and VirusTotal, hashing, strings, Detect It Easy, the Portable Executable format and the Windows DLLs malware relies on.
Patching across Windows, macOS, Linux, virtual and cloud environments: prioritizing by severity and known exploits, testing patches, deployment strategies and reporting.
Why passwords fail, credential stuffing, hashing and password cracking with John the Ripper and Hashcat, and the alternatives, from MFA and hardware keys to OAuth, OpenID and LDAP.
Aligning policy with standards such as NIST, supporting audits and awareness training, and giving security input during the software development lifecycle.
Incident classification, first response, evidence preservation, business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and feeding improvements back into the SOC.
Encryption algorithms, public and private keys, PKI, hashing, elliptic curve cryptography, generating RSA and ECC certificates, and NIST key size recommendations.
How blocks form, decentralized networks, hashing and Merkle trees, consensus mechanisms, smart contracts and digital signatures.
Qubits, superposition and entanglement, what quantum computers can do, and how quantum cryptography works.
Cloud service models and shared responsibility, cloud threats such as account hijacking, IAM and data protection, and standards including ISO/IEC 27017, NIST SP 800-144 and CSA STAR.
Least privilege, microsegmentation and continuous validation of trust, and how an organization moves from a perimeter model to a zero-trust design.
Virtualization with QEMU and KVM, the Xen hypervisor, VM file formats, QEMU networking and managing virtual machines with libvirt.
Testing IoT devices against the CTIA cybersecurity certification categories: encryption, password management, role-based access, patching, audit logs and secure boot.
Assessing and prioritizing risks, threats and vulnerabilities, scheduled vulnerability scans, penetration tests, software security analysis and gap analysis against regulatory requirements.
Risk and threat action plans, mitigation planning, firewall and IDS/IPS management, zero-day threats, vendor and third-party risk, and tracking fixes until they’re done.
Domain names come from the RDoC’s RCCE page and the weights from the RCCE Exam Brochure (version 3), which shortens domains 2 to 4 to Risk Assessment, Risk Management and Implement Security Incident Response and Recovery Plan. Modules follow Rocheston’s RCCE Level 1 course outline as of October 2026. Rocheston says it reviews the certification scope every two years, so confirm on cert.rocheston.com before you test.
The questions candidates ask most often when researching the Rocheston Certified Cybersecurity Engineer certification.
RCCE is the flagship certification of the Rocheston Department of Certification (RDoC), which has run the exam since 2019. It covers the work of a cybersecurity engineer, protecting an organization’s networks, systems, programs and data, across four domains that run from policy and governance through risk assessment, risk management, and incident response and recovery. Every certified candidate pledges to follow Rocheston’s Code of Ethics, and a violation can lead to revocation.
Rocheston gives two routes to eligibility. You can attend RCCE training from a Rocheston Authorized Training Provider and receive a Certificate of Attendance, or you can self-study and apply with a letter from your supervisor or employer confirming at least two years of cybersecurity experience. Rocheston reviews each application and says it will accept or reject it within 14 days.
The RCCE exam has 100 multiple-choice questions and a 120-minute time limit, and the passing score is 62%. It’s delivered online and proctored through Rocheston Ramsys, which works with Rocheston’s Cyberclass platform. Rocheston uses more than one exam form, built to the same difficulty and with the same passing score. If you pass, you get a soft-copy certificate straight away, followed by an Acclaim digital badge and a physical certificate.
As of October 2026, Rocheston’s exam policy lists the RCCE certification exam fee at $499 USD and the retake fee at $499 USD. Rocheston sends the payment link once your eligibility application is approved. Training Camp’s RCCE boot camp includes the exam voucher, so boot camp students don’t pay the exam fee separately.
RCCE is valid for two years. To renew it for another two years, you earn 100 Rocheston Continuing Education (RCE) credits during the cycle and upload proof to the Rocheston Roxy portal. Rocheston’s RCE policy sets out five assignments worth 20 credits each, such as completing a cybersecurity course, training or mentoring other professionals, or publishing articles. If you fall short, the certification expires and you have to pass the latest exam to get it back.
The RCCE exam brochure lists four domains with these weights: Cybersecurity Policies and Governance 18%, Risks/Threats/Vulnerability Assessment 40%, Risks/Threats/Vulnerability Management 26%, and Security Incident Response and Recovery Plan 16%. Under those domains, Rocheston lists 27 technical areas, from web application attacks and malware analysis to cloud security and zero-trust architecture.
Rocheston states that RCCE is accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) under ISO/IEC 17024, the international standard for bodies that certify people. Rocheston’s Level 1 course page says RCCE is listed in the official ANAB directory and links to the listing. Accreditation is a status that has to be maintained, so check that directory yourself if your employer needs current proof.
Rocheston states that the U.S. Government recognizes and approves RCCE under the DoD 8140 directive and the DCWF framework. Its DoD 8140 page lists 15 job roles, including Cyber Defense Analyst, Cyber Defense Incident Responder, Vulnerability Assessment Analyst and Systems Security Analyst. Confirm your own work role and proficiency level on the current DoD 8140 qualification matrix before you register. See the DoD 8140 work role paths.
Level 1 is the core RCCE credential, a 25-module course followed by the 100-question exam with a 62% passing score. Level 2 is an advanced red team and blue team program on a cyber range of more than 100 machines, with its own 100-question exam and a 70% passing score. Level 3 is a five-day course in AI-driven attack and defense, and Rocheston awards it when you complete the course.
Both cover attack techniques and the tools behind them. CEH is EC-Council’s 125-question, 4-hour exam built around a five-phase hacking methodology, and it is ANAB-accredited and DoD 8140 approved. RCCE is 100 questions in 120 minutes, Rocheston claims the same two recognitions for it, and its blueprint puts 66% of the weight on assessing and managing risks, threats and vulnerabilities. RCCE’s published exam fee is $499 and it renews every two years. CEH is about $1,199 and renews every three.
No. Rocheston’s candidate handbook describes the exam as multiple choice. The hands-on part is the training. Rocheston’s Level 1 course runs on Rose OS, its Linux-based lab environment, with 12 guided labs and a capstone cyber range challenge. Rocheston also says candidates need a certain level of technical proficiency to follow the exam questions, so lab practice is still the best preparation.
Yes. Rocheston’s exam policy sets no waiting period between attempts, and the retake fee is $499 USD. You request a retake with Rocheston’s Exam Re-take Form and schedule it when it suits you.
Rocheston’s exam versions page describes the move from the earlier RCCE Level 1 exam, which had 90 questions and a 70% pass mark, to the current RCCE (ANSI) exam with 100 questions, 120 minutes and a 62% passing score. The topic list also moved from 29 hacking-focused topics to the four domains used today. Certificates earned on the older exam stay valid until the expiry date printed on them.
Whether you’re weighing the certification, working out funding, or planning training for a team, tell us where you are and we’ll help you map out the right path.