Security & Compliance: Scenario-Based Questions

Audit logs capture who did what, when, and where — providing traceability for sensitive actions in production environments. They're essential for incident response, regulatory compliance, and internal governance.

📝 What to Audit

• Authentication Events: Logins, logouts, failed attempts, MFA.
• Authorization Changes: Role or permission updates.
• Data Access: Reads, writes, exports, and deletes of sensitive or regulated data.
• Configuration Changes: System settings, infrastructure updates, deployment events.

⚙️ Technical Implementation

• Use a centralized logger with timestamped, structured (JSON) logs.
• Include user ID, IP address, action type, resource ID, and request metadata.
• Implement middleware or interceptors in APIs to automatically log access and changes.
• Ensure logs are immutable and tamper-resistant (e.g., write-once storage, hash chaining).

🔐 Security Considerations

• Mask or exclude PII and secrets from logs (e.g., passwords, tokens).
• Encrypt logs at rest and in transit.
• Restrict access to audit logs via RBAC or IAM roles.

🧪 Compliance and Monitoring

• Integrate with SIEMs (e.g., Splunk, ELK, Datadog) for alerting and analysis.
• Set up retention policies to match regulations (e.g., 90 days, 1 year).
• Review logs during security audits and postmortems.

✅ Best Practices

• Correlate logs with user identity and session context.
• Use trace IDs to link audit logs with request flows.
• Document what is logged and why in security policies.

🚫 Common Mistakes

• Storing audit logs in the same system they audit — creates conflict of interest.
• Logging too much or too little — balancing signal vs noise is key.
• Not alerting on critical audit events (e.g., failed logins, privilege escalations).

📌 Real-World Insight

Compliance standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR require detailed auditing. Teams that treat audit logging as a first-class concern gain not just regulatory approval, but stronger security posture and incident response readiness.