It is based on the new CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP) certification, which is the first in CompTIA's "Mastery Series of Exams".
I passed the CASP a few months ago, and was throughly impressed. It seems designed to be a more technical alternative to the CISSP. CompTIA has stated that is targeted for IA Technical Level III and IA Management Level II of the US DoD Directive 8570. The CASP exam was also recently ISO certified.
The CASP is the result of our being advised over a couple of years that the Department of Defense was looking for a more technical security exam to include in the “IA Technical Level III” job classification, for those military and military contractors who are in information assurance roles. The job classification that I referred to is in the Dept. of Defense “8570” directive that requires certification of all information assurance personnel.
The CASP is targeted at the lead security professional in the enterprise environment who has years of experience with security considerations specific to large multi-location organizations. The U.S. military refers to that environment as the “enclave”, which means the same thing as the enterprise in the corporate environment.
Source: CASP – The Evolution of Technical Security Certifications? (ethicalhacker.net)
