Imagine for a moment that you decided to dig deep into the question “what happens when a human presses a key on a keyboard”

[hazelweakly@hachyderm.io]

Imagine for a moment that you decided to dig deep into the question “what happens when a human presses a key on a keyboard”

The full FULL complexity of that is beyond human comprehension. It’s multiple libraries of information.

Everything. Every little bit of software. It’s all like that. Infinite https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/113591887645763333

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@hazelweakly that was an interview question we got once.

[hazelweakly@hachyderm.io]

@atax1a Hah, nice! I got it once too. I asked them if they wanted me to start with quantum physics, human neurological patterns, or the more typical starting point, and I think that threw them off a bit

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@hazelweakly (the "key on keyboard" one, not the blue one)

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@hazelweakly the scenario was 'ping example.com is on the screen, what happens when you hit enter' we started at the keyboard interrupt causing a kernel-mode context switch, and went from there. the interview was wrapping up and we covered everything from shell parsing, through the loader all the way to 'and then ping opens a raw socket' and he goes "oh, forget about ping, i just asked that to see if you knew what you were doing"

[saraislet@infosec.exchange]

@atax1a @hazelweakly I started from neurons firing and went into the electron interaction between the finger and the key before going into electric circuits, etc

Then they asked about encoding binary signals, and I was like, "hey so how is any of this relevant to the security role" and they said "oh no, this is just for fun, you already answered all the security questions"

Which was cute the first time it happened but by the third time I wanted to tell them that it would be more useful to learn about the job and the team. I didn't have the confidence to say it at that point in my career