security

Two authentications happen in every SSH session and most candidates narrate only one. Knowing who proves what, and where your agent socket ends up, is the scored material.

The question that separates console users from people who have debugged a permissions failure across accounts. Evaluation order is deterministic and knowing it makes AccessDenied readable.

S3 access failures are rarely about the bucket policy alone. The caller, object ownership and network path determine which authorization checks apply. Start with the failed request and trace changes across those boundaries.

Roles versus users looks like syntax trivia and is actually a secrets-management position. The follow-ups about instance profiles and IRSA separate practitioners from tutorial graduates.

Direct encryption hits a 4 KB wall and a shared throughput quota. Envelope encryption routes around both, and the key policy underneath is central to authorizing key use.

A cluster boundary does not always create a new cloud identity. Inspect the workload pool and principal identifier before assuming a leaked key.

sensitive = true stops the echo, not the storage. The complete answer walks the value through git, plan artifacts, state, and provider side effects, naming which mitigation closes which leak.

Vault's weakness is the single shared password, not the AES256 underneath. The senior answer covers rekey ceremonies on offboarding, encrypt_string for readable diffs, labelled vault-ids per environment, and shrinking what needs encrypting at all.

Default-deny egress breaks name resolution before it breaks anything else, and every connection times out confusingly. The practitioners are the ones who test with positive AND negative probes and know their CNI's fine print.

Rootless is the rare security control with a visible invoice. Candidates who can name what it costs, not just what it buys, are the ones who have actually migrated a build farm.

Namespaces partition resources, not trust. This question finds the people who know which sysctls are namespaced, which ones change every tenant at once, and when only a second kernel will do.

Pull auth resolves on the node before any container exists. Candidates who can order the credential chain and read 401 versus 403 versus 429 in events diagnose this in minutes; the rest rotate secrets blind.

Exec into a distroless image and you get nothing, because there is nothing to exec into. Ephemeral containers inject tooling into a running pod without restarting it, and the security caveats are what interviewers really listen for.

Pods authenticate with JWTs minted per-pod now, not eternal Secrets. The scored answer separates authentication from authorization, explains audience binding, and treats automount as opt-in rather than ambient.

The security argument for GitOps is more specific than 'Git is the source of truth'. Pull deployment can remove cluster credentials from CI, and that single fact is most of the case.

An incident response question wearing a Git costume. The wrong instinct is to rewrite history first, and it costs you the hour that matters.

The single highest-value security change available to most pipelines, and the reason it works is worth understanding rather than configuring. It removes the secret rather than protecting it.

Never-delete is a policy, not a control. Auditors and attackers both want to know what stops an admin with broad credentials, and the answer has to be mechanical.

This is a machine identity problem wearing a secrets costume. Candidates who start at encryption miss that authentication of the caller and delivery mechanics are the real design space.

A release-automation design question with a specific trust boundary. The novel risk is prompt injection: untrusted text reaching a privileged agent, where the text is the instruction and your usual input validation does not apply.

Shared batching puts two tenants' data in one process on one device. That is defensible, and it is not what most customers assume they bought, so the answer has to be specific about which boundary exists where.