Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
92 lines (80 loc) · 4.32 KB

glossary.md

File metadata and controls

92 lines (80 loc) · 4.32 KB

CyberSecurity Glossary

Cyber-Security/Defense Matrix

Under the premise that security attacks, vulnerabilities and eventually breaches will occur; cybersecurity experts develop strategies and protocols to follow in the occurrence of these events. One way to organize and categorize these is by employing the so-called cyber defense matrix where among others, elements such as, risk, layer or stratum at which the incident occur or was detected, action to be taken, etc. are arranged.

Social Engineering

One of the weakest element in any cybersecurity infrastructure is the so-called human factor, i.e. the employment of individuals to actually infiltrate and jeopardize systems. This can indeed take different forms, e.g. via email manipulation or impersonation --e.g. spam, phishing attempts--, or even convincing individuals of plugging-in physical devices such as USB sticks of unknown origin in their computers, etc. The most direct form of these attack techniques even target specific individuals by learning and correspondingly acting based on someone's typical preferences or behaviors. The generic term employed to describe this type of attacks is social engineering, as they are designed and calibrated to the specific idiosyncrasy of the victim's target. These attacks are still responsible for large number of cybersecurity breaches, and has been reported that even robust implementations, such as the utilization of MFA combined with other authentication mechanisms, could be overcome by convincing and carefully crafted manipulation. One of the best advises against this type of manipulative attacks is to always remain vigilant and suspicious, in particular do NOT trust any sources of unknown origin.

PQC - Post Quantum Cryptography

With the recent advances of quantum computers, one of the potential applications and immediate concerns is the capability for "powerful" enough quantum devices to break the encryption algorithm used nowadays. At the beginning of 2017, the NIST launched a request for proposals to develop standards to develop Post-Quantum Cryptographic (PQC) algorithms. Further information about this ongoing effort can be found in the following links:

Terms and Acronyms

  • AES Advanced Encryption Standard (symmetric)
  • ARC Advanced Research Computing
  • CVE Common Vulnerability and Exposure
  • DES Data Encryption Standard -- unsecure deprecated, replaced by AES (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4772.txt)
  • DH Diffie-Hellman algorithm
  • DDoS Distributed DoS attack
  • DoS Denial of Service attack
  • ECC Elliptic Curve Cryptography
  • ECDH Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman
  • ECDSA Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
  • EdDSA Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm
  • ECMQV Elliptic Curve MQV
  • HPC High Performance Computing, aka supercomputing
  • HTTP|HTTPS HyperText Transfer Protocol, secure hypertext transfer protocol
  • MFA | 2FA Multi-Factor (or Two-Factor) Authentication, see MFA
  • MQV Menezes-Qu-Vanstone, authentication protocol for key agreement based on DH
  • OTP One Time Password
  • PGP Pretty Good Privacy
  • PKC Public Key Cryptography, aka asymmetric cryptography
  • PQC Post-Quantum Cryptography
  • RSA Rivest-Shamir-Adelman algorithm (asymmetric)
  • SHA Secure Hash Algorithm
  • ssh Secure Shell, see ssh
  • SSL Secure Sockets Layer
  • TLS Transport Layer Security protocol, security protocols applied to communications within a computer network
  • VPN Virtual Private Network, see VPN
  • VNC Virtual Network Computing, see VNC

Last Modified: Jun. 14, 2023 -- v 1.0