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).
Technical Privacy Controls and Safeguards
Covers practical technical mechanisms and operational controls used to protect personal data throughout its lifecycle. Topics include encryption at rest and in transit and key management practices, tokenization and masking patterns and their limitations, pseudonymization and anonymization trade offs, role based and attribute based access control, authentication versus authorization, principle of least privilege, identity and access management workflows, audit logging and access review processes, and data loss prevention systems including detection rules, monitoring, and response. Candidates should explain when to apply each control, how to measure effectiveness, integration with product and cloud architectures, and coordination between privacy, security, and engineering teams.
Incident Investigation and Remediation
Focuses on systematic investigation methodology and the distinction between immediate mitigation and long term prevention. Topics include collecting and preserving evidence, establishing a reliable timeline, identifying affected systems, performing root cause analysis, containment versus remediation, and documenting findings. Covers basic digital forensics principles and chain of custody, techniques for reducing blast radius and restoring service as a short term response, and planning permanent fixes to prevent recurrence. Also addresses privacy incident investigation practices such as interviewing stakeholders, assessing regulatory and compliance implications, timeliness and documentation requirements, remediation planning, and using post incident analysis to improve processes and controls.
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.
Security Incident Response and Operations
Covers the practices, processes, and tooling for responding to security incidents and operating a security capability. Topics include the security incident lifecycle of preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post incident review; development and execution of playbooks and runbooks tailored to threat types; severity classification and decision criteria for escalation; evidence preservation and forensic analysis and chain of custody; crisis communication to stakeholders and regulators; notification and regulatory compliance considerations; and coordination with legal, privacy, communications, and executive leadership. Also includes operational aspects of building and staffing a security operations center, on call schedules and escalation, ticketing and case management, leadership and coordination during major incidents, running blameless post incident reviews to identify systemic improvements, and integration of security incident learnings into engineering and operations.
Data Breach Investigation Methodology
A targeted investigative methodology focused on incidents involving unauthorized disclosure or exfiltration of sensitive data, combining technical forensic practices with containment, impact assessment, and cross functional coordination. Core activities include immediate containment to prevent further loss, scope and compromise assessment to identify affected data and systems, impact and harm risk analysis including regulatory and notification implications, timeline reconstruction and root cause analysis to determine how the breach occurred, remediation actions and remediation validation, documentation of findings, and lessons learned for prevention. Candidates should also demonstrate understanding of collaboration between security operations, legal, privacy, communications, and business stakeholders, and how investigative findings feed remediation, disclosure obligations, and post incident risk reduction.
Data Governance and Security Implementation
Designing and applying technical and operational controls to protect data across storage, processing, and integration points. Topics include data classification and labeling to identify sensitive data, database and application level access controls such as role based access control and attribute based access control, encryption at rest and in transit, key management, tokenization and masking, secure handling of credentials and API keys, audit logging and immutable trails, retention and secure deletion policies, monitoring and alerting, and integration of these controls with privacy requirements and incident response processes. Candidates should be able to discuss concrete implementation patterns, trade offs, tooling choices, and testing and validation approaches.
Privacy Preserving Cryptography
Techniques that combine cryptography and privacy engineering to enable secure computation and data protection. Core topics include homomorphic encryption for computing over encrypted data, secure multi party computation for collaborative computation without revealing inputs, differential privacy methods for statistical analysis with privacy guarantees, oblivious transfer and related secure protocol primitives, and zero knowledge proof systems for proving statements without revealing secrets. Coverage includes practical use cases, performance and scalability limitations, parameter and threat model selection, trade offs between privacy and utility, deployment challenges, and when to prefer one approach over another.
Identity and Access Management
Design and operational practices for authentication and authorization across systems and applications. Covers identity models, provisioning and deprovisioning, role based access control and roles and permission design, policy enforcement, segregation of duties, and principle of least privilege. Includes service to service authentication and infrastructure access patterns, database authentication modes and database roles, audit trails for access and authorization changes, methods for granting and revoking permissions, and techniques to detect and investigate unauthorized access. Also addresses scaling identity and access control for large organizations, single sign on, federation, and integration with external identity providers.
Security Privacy and Operations
Covers technical privacy controls, security measures, and their operational implications. Topics include encryption at rest and in transit, access control and authentication strategies, data minimization by design, pseudonymization and anonymization techniques, secure data deletion, audit logging, monitoring, and incident response. Also covers differences and overlaps between privacy controls and security controls, tradeoffs between privacy and data utility, handling of personally identifiable information, data retention policies, and compliance and regulatory impact on design and operations. Includes coordination and communication between privacy, security, engineering, and operations teams, and how security and privacy requirements affect architecture choices, deployment strategies, rollback plans, timelines, and ongoing operational monitoring.