How to Answer: When preparing to transmit data, what would you do first, compress it, or encrypt it?
Advice and answer examples written specifically for an Information Security Analyst job interview.
9. When preparing to transmit data, what would you do first, compress it, or encrypt it?
How to Answer
This is both a technical as well as a follow-up question. In your answer to the question 'What are the differences between encoding, encrypting, and hashing?', you discussed encryption. This technical question is asking a follow-up question about how you go about performing the encryption process. As discussed earlier, you should always anticipate follow-up questions once you've answered an inquiry from an interviewer. By keeping your previous answer brief and to the point, you encouraged the interviewer to explore this topic in more detail. Since you have expertise in this area, the questions should be easy for you to answer. This is also an example of how you can guide the interviewer through the interview.
Written by William Swansen on October 1st, 2020
Answer Example
"When using encryption to secure data, you should always encrypt the data before compressing it. If you compress the data first, you could not encrypt it properly or decrypt it when received by another device. The exact process is to create an encryption key, encrypt the data, compress it, then transmit the data and the decryption key to the receiving party."
Written by William Swansen on October 1st, 2020
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