Threat Modeling and Secure System Design Questions

Applying threat modeling and structured problem solving to secure system design. Candidates should be able to decompose complex security challenges by identifying business context, critical assets, threat actors, attack surfaces, and compliance requirements. Topics include threat modeling methodologies, attacker capability and motivation analysis, risk assessment and prioritization, selection of mitigations and compensating controls, and evaluation of trade offs among security, usability, cost, and performance. Candidates should also be able to produce implementation and monitoring plans that address scalability and maintainability and to clearly explain and justify design choices and residual risk to stakeholders.

EasyTechnical

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Define and contrast the terms 'threat', 'vulnerability', and 'risk' in the context of secure system design for production infrastructure. Provide a single concrete example that contains all three concepts (identify the threat, the vulnerability, and the resulting risk) and explain how an SRE team should act on each.

EasyBehavioral

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Tell me about a time you were on-call for a production incident that had security implications. Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result): describe the incident, what role you played, the actions you took to contain risk and restore services, and what process or tooling changes you implemented afterwards to prevent recurrence.

HardTechnical

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An attacker gains access to a developer's laptop that holds active credentials, SSH keys, and short-lived cloud tokens. As the SRE lead, outline immediate containment steps, how you would identify affected services and credentials, steps to rotate or revoke keys and tokens, evidence collection, and long-term controls to reduce probability and blast radius of such compromises.

MediumTechnical

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Construct an attack tree for a payment authorization endpoint in an e-commerce system. Include branches for credential compromise, API abuse, man-in-the-middle, database tampering, and supply-chain compromise. For each major branch provide at least two leaf nodes describing specific attack steps and propose mitigations targeted at the highest-probability leaf nodes.

MediumTechnical

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Propose a realistic plan for reducing risk from open-source and third-party dependencies used in your production services. Include build-time measures (pinning, scanning), runtime protections (WAF, sandboxing), SBOM generation, automated CVE monitoring, and how to prioritize dependency updates across many services.

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