Handling Novel Technologies and Evidence Questions

Covers how a candidate responds when encountering unfamiliar hardware, software, devices, file systems, encryption schemes, or novel data structures and evidence types. Assess the candidate on troubleshooting fundamentals applied to unknown systems, rapid learning and research strategies, use of documentation and external resources, when and how to engage subject matter experts, and how they validate and document new techniques. Interviewers may probe for examples of unexpected findings, how the candidate iterated on investigative approaches, risk management under time pressure, and how they ensured forensic soundness and reproducibility when standard tools or processes did not apply.

MediumTechnical

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Design a test harness to validate new evidence handling techniques. Include strategies for generating test data (synthetic and anonymized real data), deterministic seeds, golden images for regression, CI integration, metrics for correctness and performance, and audit logs that capture reproduction steps.

HardTechnical

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You find a custom filesystem inside a disk image with unfamiliar metadata structures and no documentation. Outline a deep reverse-engineering approach: discovery, block-level statistical analysis, recognition of repeating structures, carving known object types, building parsers incrementally, linking to firmware/bootloader code for hints, and validating via round-trip reconstruction.

MediumTechnical

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Explain a practical approach to perform differential analysis between two firmware images to discover injected code, new certificates, modified configs, or changed boot chains. Mention tools (binwalk, radare2, Ghidra), automated diffing strategies, and how to present reproducible findings.

MediumTechnical

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Implement a small C++ program or function that reads the first 16 bytes of a file and matches it against a provided 'magic' database of <hex-prefix,label> pairs. Ensure safe binary file handling, efficient prefix matching, and edge-case handling for short files and IO errors.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Write a Python script (describe structure or pseudocode) that scans a directory tree recursively, detects files whose extension does not match their magic signature (use python-magic or a fallback), computes SHA-256 for each mismatched file by streaming in chunks, and outputs a CSV with: path, detected_type, extension, sha256. The script should handle symlinks and very large directories.

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