System designHardsd-p117

Subject Auth securityLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Security interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a system that gives each service/workload a verifiable identity so services can authenticate to each other (and to resources) without long-lived shared secrets.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.