Cryptographic API Design and Misuse Prevention Questions

Designing cryptographic application programming interfaces and libraries that minimize developer mistakes and promote secure defaults. Areas include choosing high level primitives that provide authenticated encryption and integrity, hiding unsafe low level primitives unless explicitly required, preventing key reuse across contexts, clear parameter binding and key separation, secure error handling that does not leak secrets, versioning and migration strategies, comprehensive documentation and examples, and testing to detect common misuse patterns. Candidates should explain how ergonomic design, defaults, and documentation reduce security risks and how to instrument libraries to detect incorrect usage.