Deep dives on software engineering, networking, and ethical hacking — the concepts I wish someone had drawn out for me.
Follow a realistic attack chain from reconnaissance through SSRF and insecure deserialization to remote code execution — and how to break the chain at every stage.
Why indexes make reads fast and writes slow, how the planner chooses them, and how to read an EXPLAIN plan like a senior engineer.
A packet-by-packet walk through the TLS 1.3 handshake — ClientHello, key shares, 0-RTT, and why it is both faster and safer than TLS 1.2.
Idempotency keys, safe retries, the exactly-once illusion, and the patterns that keep distributed APIs correct when the network fails.
The classic senior-interview question answered in depth: DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP, and the rendering pipeline — every hop from keystroke to pixels.
alg=none, algorithm-confusion, weak secrets, and token replay — the JWT attacks every backend engineer should understand, and how to defend.
How DNS resolution really works under the hood — recursion, caching, TTLs — and how attackers poison caches, plus the defenses that stop them.
From classic stack smashing to stack canaries, NX, ASLR, and the return-oriented programming techniques that bypass them — a defender's mental model.
Mental models for concurrency: data races, memory ordering, mutexes versus lock-free structures, and how to reason about correctness.
Token bucket versus sliding window, Redis-backed counters, race-free atomic increments, and the trade-offs of rate limiting at scale.
How data is concealed inside ordinary images, files, and network traffic — steganography, covert channels, and the detection techniques defenders use to catch it.
A defender's breakdown of Android RAT payloads: how a malicious APK gains control, why permissions and sideloading are the weak points, and how to detect and prevent infection.
