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Secure Coding and Application Security Questions

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.

MediumTechnical
32 practiced
Write a script (shell or Python) that scans a repository of Dockerfiles and flags insecure patterns: FROM latest/tagless base, USER root, ADD with remote URL, missing HEALTHCHECK, and no explicit non-root user. Output results in JSON suitable for CI integration.
HardSystem Design
40 practiced
Explain how to implement mutual TLS (mTLS) across microservices at scale in a Kubernetes environment. Cover certificate issuance and rotation, bootstrapping new services, sidecar vs in-process libraries, performance impact, and debugging approaches for mTLS handshake failures.
MediumTechnical
44 practiced
A microservice currently logs full request payloads and stack traces on errors. Design a secure logging policy and implementation plan that preserves observability for SREs while preventing sensitive data leakage (PII, secrets). Include redaction rules, structured logging, sampling, and access controls.
MediumTechnical
39 practiced
Create a practical checklist SREs should use before approving a new open-source dependency for production: security (vulnerabilities), maintenance activity, license compatibility, presence of CI, release signing, SBOM, and transitive dependency review.
MediumTechnical
57 practiced
Write Python code that securely validates an RS256-signed JWT using a JWKS endpoint. The function should: fetch and cache keys from JWKS, verify signature, check exp, iat, iss, aud, and reject tokens where 'alg' or 'kid' are missing or unexpected. Use a well-known library; do not implement raw crypto.

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