Programming Languages & Core Development Topics
Programming languages, development fundamentals, coding concepts, and core data structures. Includes syntax, algorithms, memory management at a programming level, asynchronous patterns, and concurrency primitives. Also covers core data manipulation concepts like hashing, collections, error handling, and DOM manipulation for web development. Excludes tool-specific proficiency (see 'Tools, Frameworks & Implementation Proficiency').
Bitwise Operations and Bit Manipulation
Covers working with binary representations of integers and performing fundamental bitwise operations including and, or, xor, not, and left and right shifts. Includes techniques for testing setting clearing and toggling individual bits, creating and applying masks, and using bit fields and bit packed structures for compact storage. Addresses endianness and byte order considerations, bit level register manipulation for hardware and embedded systems, and efficient bit algorithms such as population count parity leading and trailing zero detection and sign extension. Encompasses practical uses in protocol parsing flag management performance optimizations and cryptographic primitives including substitution and diffusion concepts. Candidates may be assessed with coding problems that require bit tricks and algorithmic reasoning as well as design questions about data layout and low level interfaces.
Data Structures for Cryptography
Focuses on the data representations and structures that support correct and efficient cryptographic implementations. Candidates should be able to reason about representations for large integers and limb arrays, bitsets and bit operations, byte buffers and memory layout, hash table use for key indexing, ring buffers for streaming processing, and data structures used in key stores and certificate caches. Topics include memory alignment, endianness, secure memory erasure, constant time access patterns, concurrency and thread safety, and the performance and security trade offs that follow from different structure choices.