Security links Concepts & Products Organisations & Programs
Concepts & Products
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
| Item | Meaning | |
|---|---|---|
| A | ||
| Access | Ability to get at data or resources. | |
| Accountability | e.g. you are responsible if you give away your password. | |
| ActiveX Controls | A set of rules invented by Microsoft describing how applications should share information. They give full access to the Windows operating system. Platform-dependent. Microsoft runs a registration scheme for them. | |
| ADFGVX | A German World War I cipher that used both substitution and transposition. | |
| Adjacent Letter | A form of transposition. In this case, adjacent letters of the message are transposed, for example: WHEN SHALL WE THREE MEET AGAIN IN THUNDER LIGHTNING OR IN RAIN becomes: HWNEHSLAWLTERHEEEMTEGAIAINTNUHDNREILHGNTNIOGIRRNIAN
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| Advanced Encryption Standard | (AES) "A Federal Information Processing Standard (No. 197) that specifies a cryptographic algorithm for use by U.S. Government organisations to protect sensitive, unclassified information. AES factsheet: NIST. AES home page | |
| AES | Advanced Encryption Standard. See RSA's AES,
What is the AES? What are some candidates for the AES?, What is the schedule for the AES? | |
| AFIS | Automated fingerprint identification system technology | |
| Agent | A bot that goes out to collect data, for instance those which collect URLs for search engines. | |
| AM&AACM | Authorization Management and Advanced Access Control Models | |
| Ankle Biter | People who download a program that someone else has created for hacking - they don't invent anything themselves. | |
| ANSI X9 | See RSA's What are ANSI X9 standards? | |
| Applet | Executable program | |
| ASCII | American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Non-numeric characters are converted to numbers. | |
| ASSET | Automated Security Self-Evaluation Tool | |
| Asymmetric algorithm | One key to lock, another to unlock (key distribution problem). Public key. | |
| Asymmetric Cryptography | Different keys are used for encryption and decryption. Includes RSA. | |
| Atbash | The Hebrews used a substitution cipher called atbash in the Old Testament, replacing the first letter of their alphabet by the last, the second by the second last, and so on. The equivalent in English would be as follows: Plain alphabet: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzCipher alphabet: ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
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| Attacks | See RSA's What are some of the basic types of cryptanalytic attack?, What are the most important attacks on MACs?, What are the most important attacks on stream ciphers?, What are the most important attacks on symmetric block ciphers? | |
| Audit trail | Way of keeping track who or what has done what. In security, used for detecting security violations. | |
| Authentication | Verifying the identity of a user. See RSA's How is the RSA algorithm used for authentication and digital signatures in practice?, What is a digital signature and what is authentication? | |
| Availability | Whether a system can be used (which it can't if there is a successful Denial of Service attack, for example). |
Organisations & Programs
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
| Item | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ACM | Association for Computing Machinery (US), ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security |
| ACSA | Applied Computer Security Associates |
| AICPA | American Institute of Certified Public Accountants |
| ASIS | American Society for Industrial Security |
| ASP | Association of Shareware Professionals |
| AfB | Association for Biometrics (UK) |
| AVERT | Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team (McAfee) |