Security and Data Privacy

Covers design and operational practices for protecting systems and user data. Candidates should be able to explain authentication and authorization models including token based approaches and role based access control, encryption at rest and encryption in transit, key management and secrets rotation, secure application programming interface design and input validation, audit logging and security monitoring, data governance and privacy controls, compliance with data protection regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act, data minimization and anonymization techniques, threat modeling and vulnerability management, incident response and breach notification procedures, and trade offs between security, performance and developer productivity.

0 questions

Mobile App Security and Authentication

Platform specific security practices for mobile applications and clients. Topics include secure storage of credentials and tokens, protecting secrets on device, certificate pinning and secure transport, secure use of OAuth and token refresh flows on mobile, defending against reverse engineering and tampering, permission models and least privilege for mobile apps, privacy and compliance considerations, secure API usage patterns from mobile clients, and strategies for mitigating mobile specific attack vectors.

33 questions

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).

0 questions

Mobile Security Fundamentals

Core mobile security practices for protecting user data and application integrity on devices and in transit. Candidates should explain secure credential storage using platform key stores such as the iOS keychain and the Android keystore, secure transport using hypertext transfer protocol over TLS and certificate pinning, safe storage and encryption for data at rest, secure handling of authentication tokens and refresh logic, input validation and safe deserialization, and principles for avoiding sensitive data leakage in logs or debug output. Include reasoning about third party dependency risk, threat modeling for common mobile attack vectors, tamper detection and obfuscation where appropriate, and operational practices such as key rotation and periodic security testing.

0 questions

Authentication and Authorization

Cover core concepts and implementation trade offs for securing backend services. Candidates should demonstrate understanding of token based authentication and server side session strategies, how to securely issue and rotate credentials, techniques for revocation and refresh, secure storage of secrets, use of third party identity providers, common threat mitigations such as cross site request forgery protection and secure transmission practices, and design patterns for role based and attribute based access control. Interviewers will evaluate the candidate ability to reason about scalability and revocation trade offs and to design secure application programming interface permission checks.

0 questions

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.

0 questions

Security Testing Fundamentals

Fundamental practices for identifying and mitigating security vulnerabilities in software. Candidates should understand common failure modes described by the Open Web Application Security Project Top Ten and related risks such as injection attacks including structured query language injection, cross site scripting, broken authentication and authorization, insecure direct object references, and security misconfiguration. Coverage includes secure coding patterns such as input validation, output encoding, parameterized queries, secure session handling, least privilege, and secret management. Testing approaches include manual exploratory security testing, threat modeling, dynamic security scanning, static analysis, dependency and composition analysis, fuzz testing, and targeted penetration testing. Candidates should also be able to explain how to integrate security checks into automated test suites and continuous integration pipelines and how to prioritize security fixes by impact and exploitability.

0 questions

OWASP Top Ten and CWE Top Twenty Five

Comprehensive knowledge of the Open Web Application Security Project Top Ten categories and the Common Weakness Enumeration Top Twenty Five weaknesses, focused on identification, exploitation mechanisms, root causes, business impact, and prevention. Candidates should understand each vulnerability class in depth, including injection, broken authentication and authorization, cross site scripting, cross site request forgery, security misconfiguration, insecure design, vulnerable and outdated components, cryptographic and data integrity failures, logging and monitoring gaps, server side request forgery, and related common weakness patterns. Assessment covers how to find these issues in source code and running applications, how attacks are constructed, secure coding fixes and remediation, threat modeling and secure design choices to prevent them, use of static and dynamic analysis and dependency scanning tools, vulnerability prioritization and patching strategies, and runtime detection and monitoring practices. Candidates should be able to explain concrete code examples, demonstrate fixes, and map specific code patterns to CWE entries when relevant.

0 questions

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.

0 questions

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.

0 questions

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.

0 questions

Attack Vectors and Threat Landscape

Comprehensive knowledge of cyberattack types, common attack vectors, and the evolving threat landscape across human, application, network, and supply chain layers. Candidates should be able to explain how each attack class operates, typical entry points and vulnerable assets, and real world examples. Core topics include phishing and social engineering; malware families such as ransomware and rootkits; denial of service and distributed denial of service attacks; man in the middle attacks; injection attacks including structured query language injection; cross site scripting; cross site request forgery; broken authentication and session management; insecure direct object references and other entries from the Open Web Application Security Project Top Ten; privilege escalation; brute force attacks; zero day exploits; insider threats; insecure configuration; insecure deserialization; and supply chain attacks. For each class candidates should cover indicators of compromise and detection signals, logging and monitoring strategies, behavioral analysis and anomaly detection methods, and threat hunting approaches. Candidates should also discuss prevention and mitigation controls such as secure coding practices, input validation and parameterized queries, output encoding and content security policy, secure authentication and session management, access controls and network segmentation, rate limiting and traffic filtering, secure configuration and patch management, backup and recovery, and supply chain risk management. They should be able to map these controls to incident response activities including containment, eradication, recovery, and post incident remediation, and demonstrate how to use threat modeling to prioritize defenses based on asset criticality and likely attack paths. Finally, candidates should be prepared to describe trends in the threat landscape, high profile breaches and lessons learned, the difference between active and passive attacks, and how threats and defensive priorities vary by industry and organizational scale.

0 questions

Application and Web Vulnerabilities

Comprehensive knowledge of common application and web security weaknesses and attack vectors across modern architectures and deployment models. Candidates should understand categories such as structured query language injection, command injection, cross site scripting, cross site request forgery, insecure deserialization, broken authentication and session management, broken access control, sensitive data exposure, insecure cryptography, security misconfiguration, using components with known vulnerabilities, insufficient logging and monitoring, race conditions, server side request forgery, xml external entity attacks, and business logic flaws. They should be able to explain attack mechanisms and exploitation techniques, give real world examples and business impact, and describe architectural and design level mitigations and secure patterns to reduce exposure. Familiarity with taxonomies and severity frameworks such as the Open Web Application Security Project Top Ten and the Common Weakness Enumeration, and an understanding of how prevalence and risk differ by application type, architecture, platform, and deployment pattern, is expected. Candidates should also know common assessment approaches and tooling such as vulnerability scanning, static application security testing, dynamic application security testing, and manual penetration testing.

0 questions

Data Protection and Encryption

Design and practical application of controls to protect sensitive data with a primary focus on encryption and key management across cloud and on premises environments. Core areas include encryption at rest, encryption in transit, and encryption in use; selection and trade offs between symmetric and asymmetric algorithms and relevant protocols; standards based and application level techniques such as field level encryption and end to end encryption; client side and server side encryption patterns; envelope encryption and hardware backed key storage. Includes design and operational practices for key lifecycle management including secure key generation, secure storage, rotation, revocation, backup and recovery, high availability and disaster recovery, multi region and multi account deployments, and integration with hardware security modules and managed key vaults. Covers complementary techniques such as tokenization, format preserving encryption, and data masking, as well as identification and classification of sensitive data and sensitive data flows and consistent enforcement across databases, object storage, caches and message queues. Also includes transport layer protection and secrets management, performance and scalability trade offs of encryption and key rotation, audit logging and monitoring of encryption controls, incident response and breach handling for encrypted data, access controls and separation of duties around key access, and regulatory and compliance considerations including data residency and standards relevant to payment and personal data protection.

0 questions

Investigation and Information Gathering

Skills and methods for systematically investigating an ambiguous situation and gathering the information needed to reach a sound conclusion. Covers efficient triage and prioritization of what to collect first, distinguishing established fact from assumption or circumstantial detail, correlating information from multiple sources to build a coherent timeline of what happened, and identifying who or what is affected. Includes the communication side: asking targeted clarifying questions of stakeholders, figuring out which missing details actually matter for the decision at hand, and obtaining necessary inputs from others in a time efficient manner, especially when information is incomplete or conflicting. Emphasizes sound judgment under uncertainty: knowing when you have enough information to act, when to keep digging, and how to assemble a clear, defensible narrative from partial evidence. Applies broadly, from technical investigations (for example tracing an incident through system logs and telemetry) to business, legal, or product investigations (for example reconstructing what happened from customer reports, contracts, or account activity).

0 questions

Security Engineering & Operations Topics

Security and Data Privacy

Mobile App Security and Authentication

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) & Supply Chain Security

Mobile Security Fundamentals

Authentication and Authorization

Code Obfuscation and Reverse Engineering

Security Testing Fundamentals

OWASP Top Ten and CWE Top Twenty Five

TLS Protocol Security

Authentication and Access Control

Secure Coding and Application Security

Attack Vectors and Threat Landscape

Application and Web Vulnerabilities

Data Protection and Encryption

Investigation and Information Gathering