Cryptographic Techniques and Trends Questions

Broad knowledge of contemporary and emerging cryptographic primitives, protocols, and research directions. Includes understanding of authenticated encryption with associated data and why it is preferred over legacy constructions, password based key derivation functions such as PBKDF2, Argon2, and scrypt and the role of salting and key stretching, elliptic curve cryptography design and trade offs, and an awareness of post quantum cryptography candidates including lattice based, multivariate, and hash based approaches. Also encompasses familiarity with the modern threat landscape such as quantum computing risks, how cryptographic research progresses into standards and real world practice, how to follow relevant conferences and journals, and the ability to synthesize research findings into practical recommendations for design, migration, and policy decisions.