Application security

Application security interviews operate secure systems with OWASP awareness, secret hygiene, dependency review, validation, uploads, rate limits, and tamper-resistant audit evidence.

Subtopics: OWASP with secrets and dependency scanning, validation/encoding/upload security, and rate limiting with audit logs.

On interviews: prioritize risks for a file-upload feature, triage a dependency CVE, and design identity-aware rate limits with audit trails for sensitive actions.

Common pitfalls: audit logs without integrity controls, upload scanning only on the client, and rate limits that block ops during incidents.

The trade-off is balancing simplicity, performance, safety, and operability — name which axis you optimized and what cost you accepted.

Checklist:

• Use OWASP as a review checklist, not a badge.
• Scan dependencies; keep secrets out of repos and logs.
• Isolate uploads with type, size, and storage boundaries.
• Rate limit abuse; audit security-sensitive events.