Merge Overlapping Cloud Security Rules
Last updated: December 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Given a list of cloud security group rules with IP ranges and port ranges, merge overlapping rules to produce a minimal set of equivalent rules. Identify conflicts between allow and deny rules.
Wiz
December 9, 202510
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Given a list of cloud security group rules with IP ranges and port ranges, merge overlapping rules to produce a minimal set of equivalent rules. Identify conflicts between allow and deny rules.
Cloud security groups accumulate rules over time, often with overlapping IP ranges and port ranges. Simplifying these rules helps security teams understand their actual exposure. This problem combines interval merging with network security domain knowledge. The interviewer expects clean code and careful handling of the allow/deny interaction.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Parse and normalize IP ranges (CIDR notation) and port ranges
- Implement interval merging for both IP and port dimensions
- Detect conflicts between allow and deny rules on overlapping ranges
- Produce a minimal equivalent rule set
- Handle edge cases like wildcard rules (0.0.0.0/0)
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Clarify input constraints and edge cases before writing code.
- Walk through your approach verbally and confirm with the interviewer before coding.
- Start with a brute force solution, then optimize. Mention time and space complexity.
- Test your solution with examples, including edge cases like empty input or duplicates.
- Consider common patterns: sliding window, two pointers, hash map, BFS/DFS, dynamic programming.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you extend this to handle protocol (TCP/UDP/ICMP) as a third dimension?
- What is the complexity of your solution?
- How would you visualize the merged rules for a security audit?
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Practice DSA ProblemsSample Answer
Problem Analysis
The problem requires us to merge overlapping cloud security rules that consist of IP ranges and port ranges. The key pattern here is the interval merging algorithm applied in two dimensions: IP ra...
Approach
- Parsing Input: Convert the CIDR notation into a list of IP addresses or ranges that can be easily compared. For example,
192.168.1.0/24translates into the range from192.168.1.0to `192.16...
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