Cyber Lexicon+ 2025 Edition
The 2025 edition of Cyber Lexicon+ is now available. This book provides a comprehensive glossary of key cybersecurity terms, acronyms, and concepts, with a focus on quantum-safe computing, applied cryptography, and operational resilience.
Draft reviewed by experts and finalized as of September 15, 2025.
Cybersecurity Glossary
- Applied Cryptography
- Cryptography uses mathematical functions to transform data and prevent it from being read or tampered with by unauthorized parties. Applied cryptography focuses on the practical implementation of these techniques in real-world systems.
- Crypto-Agility
- Crypto agility describes the capabilities needed to replace and adapt cryptographic algorithms for protocols, applications, software, hardware, and infrastructure, in response to evolving threats and standards.
- DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)
- A denial of service technique that uses numerous hosts to perform the attack, overwhelming a target with traffic to disrupt service.
- Operational Resilience
- The ability of systems to resist, absorb, and recover from or adapt to an adverse occurrence during operation that may cause harm, destruction, or loss of ability to perform mission-related functions.
- Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC)
- The goal of post-quantum cryptography is to develop cryptographic systems that are secure against both quantum and classical computers, and can interoperate with existing communications protocols and networks.
- Quantum-Safe Computing
- Quantum-safe cryptography refers to efforts to identify algorithms that are resistant to attacks by both classical and quantum computers.
- Shor's Algorithm
- Shor's algorithm is a quantum algorithm for finding the prime factors of an integer. It was developed in 1994 by the American mathematician Peter Shor.
- Zero Trust
- Zero trust is an evolving set of cybersecurity paradigms that move defenses from static, network-based perimeters to focus on users, assets, and resources.
For more on secure software practices, see my publication Avoiding Unsafe Software. Explore all my publications for deeper insights.
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