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AI Security

Interview question · Network Security & Protocols

Forward proxies, reverse proxies and WAFs: how each works, which headers you can trust behind them, and how WAFs get bypassed.

Put a proxy in front of an app and two new questions appear: who is the real client, and does the proxy read the request the same way the app does?

mediumNewPreparation tags: Google, Amazon, MicrosoftUpdated Nov 2026

Put a proxy in front of an app and two new questions appear: who is the real client, and does the proxy read the request the same way the app does?

Make your first attempt

What would you say before reading the answer?

  1. 01 State the assumptions your answer depends on.
  2. 02 Explain the mechanism and choose a control.
  3. 03 Name a condition that would change your decision.

The worked answer includes an approach, scoring criteria and follow-up questions. Compare the reasoning with your own.

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What if · the follow-ups in this answer

The answer works through 6 follow-ups like an interviewer would

A team asks whether a web application firewall in front of their API will protect it from attacks.

  1. What is the difference between forward and reverse proxies?
  2. What can a WAF catch?
  3. What can a WAF not catch?
  4. What is the risk with forwarded client addresses?
  5. How should the origin be protected?
  6. What would you tell the team?

Each rung has a nudge, a model answer, the principle that carries over and the weak answer to avoid. Premium opens every answer and ladder.

UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY
Next in this trackHow do ARP spoofing, MAC flooding, VLAN hopping and rogue DHCP work on a local network, and which switch and protocol controls stop them?Next in this trackHow does IPsec work: IKEv2 negotiation, security associations, ESP versus AH, tunnel versus transport mode, and NAT traversal?Next in this trackHow does WireGuard work: static keys, its one-round-trip handshake, cryptokey routing, and why it deliberately has no cipher negotiation?
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