Security Engineering & Operations Topics
Operational security practices, secure systems implementation, threat modeling, penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and security operations at production scale. Covers network security, endpoint security, secure architecture implementation, incident response mechanics, and security automation. Distinct from Security & Compliance (which addresses governance, compliance frameworks, and policy) and from Security Research & Innovation (which addresses novel techniques and research contributions).
Vulnerability Management and Infrastructure Hardening
Discuss processes and technical controls for identifying and remediating vulnerabilities and hardening infrastructure. Include vulnerability scanning for hosts containers and images, dependency and supply chain scanning, prioritization and triage of findings, patch management and staged rollouts, infrastructure as code scanning, configuration and baseline enforcement, penetration testing and red team remediation, runtime protection and monitoring, remediation tracking and metrics, and integration of security workflows into release and incident management.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) & Supply Chain Security
Understand how to identify and manage third-party dependencies and open-source components. Know tools and techniques for detecting vulnerable dependencies, managing license compliance, and responding to supply chain attacks. Discuss how to evaluate third-party security, conduct security reviews of dependencies, and maintain a software bill of materials (SBOM).
Port Connectivity and Firewall Troubleshooting
Techniques for diagnosing port level connectivity and firewall related failures. Topics include how Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol connections are established, differences between well known and ephemeral ports, service binding to interfaces and addresses, connection state semantics in stateful firewalls, and network address translation and port forwarding behaviors. Candidates should demonstrate how to inspect listening services and sockets, perform connection testing and port scans from multiple vantage points, validate firewall rule sets, and analyze packet captures for handshake failures, resets, or dropped traffic. Include cloud provider specifics such as security group rules, load balancer listener configuration, and validating end to end access paths.
Code Obfuscation and Reverse Engineering
Techniques and trade offs for protecting application logic and compiled binaries from reverse engineering and tampering, applicable across native software contexts (mobile apps, desktop applications, embedded and firmware binaries, and licensing or DRM enforced components). Candidates should understand code obfuscation approaches such as symbol stripping, control flow obfuscation, string and resource encryption, native library protection, and binary packing, as well as runtime anti tampering and anti debugging measures. Coverage includes platform specific release and signing practices as concrete illustrations of the general problem: for example Android release tooling, application signing, and ProGuard or R8 style shrinkers, or iOS code signing and hardened runtime configuration, alongside equivalent desktop and embedded code signing and packing practices. Also covers secure handling of embedded client secrets and keys, and approaches for protecting native or compiled modules generally. Evaluate how these protections affect crash reporting and diagnostics, testing strategies to validate protections, and the balance between protection strength, performance overhead, maintainability, and recoverability during incidents.
Embedded Systems Security
Focuses on security practices and threat mitigation for embedded devices and Internet of Things deployments. Topics include secure boot and device attestation, firmware integrity verification, secure over the air updates, encrypted storage and secure key storage, device authentication and secure communication channels, and runtime protections. Also covers constraints of embedded platforms such as limited computational power and memory for cryptography, strategies for key management on devices, supply chain security, vulnerability disclosure and update processes, privacy implications of device data, and regulatory and compliance considerations for domains such as medical and automotive systems.
TLS Protocol Security
Deep understanding of transport layer security protocols and their secure deployment. Topics include TLS handshake mechanics, cipher suite negotiation, certificate validation and management, session resumption and key exchange algorithms, forward secrecy, common vulnerabilities and mitigations such as downgrade and padding oracle attacks, practical configuration for servers and clients, certificate revocation and lifecycle management, and compatibility considerations across protocol versions.
Authentication and Access Control
Comprehensive coverage of methods, protocols, design principles, and practical mechanisms for proving identity and enforcing permissions across systems. Authentication topics include credential based methods such as passwords and secure password storage, Multi Factor Authentication, one time passwords, certificate based and passwordless authentication, biometric options, federated identity and single sign on using Open Authorization, OpenID Connect and Security Assertion Markup Language, and service identity approaches such as Kerberos and mutual Transport Layer Security. Covers token based and session based patterns including JSON Web Token and session cookies, secure cookie practices, token lifecycle and refresh strategies, token revocation approaches, refresh token design, and secure storage and transport of credentials and tokens. Authorization and access control topics include role based access control, attribute based access control, discretionary and mandatory access control, access control lists and policy based access control, Open Authorization scopes and permission modeling, privilege management and the principle of least privilege, and defenses against privilege escalation and broken access control. The description also addresses cryptographic foundations that underlie identity systems including symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, public key infrastructure and certificate lifecycle management, secure key management and rotation, and encryption in transit and at rest. Common threats and mitigations are covered, such as credential stuffing, brute force attacks, replay attacks, session fixation, cross site request forgery, broken authentication logic, rate limiting, account lockout strategies, secrets management, secure transport, and careful authorization checks. Candidates should be able to design authentication and authorization flows for both user and service identities, evaluate protocol and implementation trade offs, specify secure lifecycle and storage strategies for credentials and tokens, and propose mitigations for common failures and attacks.
Static Application Security Testing
Focuses on static analysis of source code and binaries to identify security weaknesses before deployment. Topics include how static application security testing tools detect common weakness patterns, configuration of scans, choosing when to run scans in the development lifecycle such as pre commit hooks and continuous integration pipelines, techniques to reduce and triage false positives, integrating findings into developer workflows and issue trackers, policy enforcement and governance when scaling scanning across many projects, limitations of static analysis and complementary controls, and strategies for developer education and remediation tracking.
Secure Coding and Application Security
Covers the principles and practices for building and maintaining secure software throughout the secure software development lifecycle. Topics include secure coding patterns, common vulnerabilities and mitigations such as injection, cross site scripting, insecure deserialization, broken authentication and authorization, improper error handling, and insecure configuration. Includes threat modeling, secrets management, dependency and supply chain hygiene, vulnerability and patch management, and principles of least privilege and defense in depth. Covers code level controls such as input validation and output encoding, use of vetted libraries, avoiding dangerous custom cryptography, and guarding against side channel and timing attacks. Also covers security activities and tools including code review best practices, static application security testing, dynamic application security testing, interactive application security testing, dependency scanning, and how to integrate security testing and gates into continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines to improve application security maturity.