Week 10: Security Engineering Phone Screen: 10 Questions You Must Answer Fluently

This blog post is Part 1 of a Security Engineering Interview Prep series, covering 10 phone screen questions from Saed Farah's 94-question bank targeting mid-level roles at companies like Anthropic, GitLab, and Stripe. The visible questions address the TCP three-way handshake (including ISN randomization to prevent session hijacking) and the rationale behind HTTP cookies for session persistence. Nine of the ten questions are flagged as indispensable, meaning a weak answer is a disqualifying signal in interviews.