Security Fundamentals and Core Concepts Questions

Core security concepts and foundational knowledge that interviewers will assess, including authentication and authorization models and identity management, secure credential handling and multi factor authentication, session management and token strategies, symmetric and asymmetric cryptography and when to use each, public key infrastructure and certificate lifecycle management, transport layer security for network communications, cryptographic hashing and integrity protection, secure key generation and storage practices, randomness for cryptographic operations, encryption at rest and in transit, basic threat modeling and attack surface analysis, and design principles such as least privilege and defense in depth. Candidates should be able to reason about when and how to apply these controls, trade offs involved, and how to validate that controls are implemented correctly.