Technology Glossary

Also: agentic AI · autonomous agent · tool use

An AI agent is a system that uses a language model to plan and execute multi-step tasks by calling external tools — searching, running code, querying APIs — and iterating on the results, rather than producing a single response.

Also: alignment · AI safety

AI alignment is the field concerned with ensuring AI systems reliably pursue the goals their operators actually intend, rather than the literal specification given or some proxy the system learned during training.

Also: evals · benchmarking · LLM evaluation

AI evaluation is the practice of systematically measuring model performance against defined tasks and criteria, using benchmarks, human review, or automated graders to quantify capability and detect regressions.

Also: AI regulation · AI policy · AI Act

AI governance refers to the policies, regulations, and internal controls that determine how AI systems may be developed and deployed, including risk assessment, transparency obligations, and accountability for harms.

Also: model red teaming · adversarial testing

AI red teaming is the practice of deliberately probing a model or AI-powered application for harmful, unsafe, or policy-violating behaviour before and after deployment.

Also: de-identification · pseudonymization · re-identification

Anonymisation is the process of altering data so that individuals can no longer be identified from it, either directly or by combining it with other available information — as distinct from pseudonymisation, which only replaces identifiers with reversible tokens.

Also: Application Programming Interface · REST API · endpoint

An API (application programming interface) is a defined contract through which one piece of software provides functionality or data to another, specifying available operations, expected inputs, and returned outputs.

Also: 3-2-1 backup · immutable backup · disaster recovery

Backup and recovery is the practice of maintaining recoverable copies of data and systems, and verifying that restoration actually works, so that an organisation can recover from destruction, corruption, or ransomware.

Also: device fingerprinting · canvas fingerprinting

Browser fingerprinting is a tracking technique that identifies a user by combining observable characteristics of their device and browser — screen resolution, installed fonts, graphics rendering behaviour, time zone — into a signature distinctive enough to recognise across sites.

Also: buffer overrun · stack overflow vulnerability · heap overflow

A buffer overflow is a memory-safety vulnerability in which a program writes more data into a fixed-size memory buffer than it can hold, corrupting adjacent memory and potentially allowing an attacker to alter program execution.

Also: vulnerability reward program · VRP

A bug bounty is a programme in which an organisation offers monetary rewards to external security researchers who responsibly report vulnerabilities in its systems.

Also: BEC · CEO fraud · invoice fraud

Business email compromise (BEC) is a fraud in which an attacker impersonates or hijacks a trusted business email account to induce fraudulent payments or data disclosure, typically without deploying any malware.

Also: California Consumer Privacy Act · CPRA · California privacy law

The CCPA, as amended by the CPRA, is California's consumer privacy law, granting residents rights to know what personal information businesses collect about them, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing.

Also: CA · TLS certificate · PKI

A certificate authority (CA) is a trusted organisation that issues digital certificates binding a cryptographic public key to a verified identity, such as a domain name, enabling encrypted and authenticated connections.

Also: control groups · cgroup v2

cgroups (control groups) are a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage — CPU, memory, disk I/O, network — of a group of processes.

Also: continuous integration · continuous delivery · build pipeline

CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) is the practice of automatically building, testing, and deploying code changes, so that every commit is verified and releases become routine rather than exceptional events.

Also: pull request review · peer review · PR review

Code review is the practice of having changes examined by other engineers before they are merged, catching defects, spreading knowledge, and maintaining consistency across a codebase.

Also: artifact signing · binary signing

Code signing is the practice of cryptographically signing software artifacts so that recipients can verify who produced them and confirm the code has not been altered since signing.

Also: compilation · JIT · transpiler

A compiler translates source code written in one language into another form — typically machine code or bytecode — performing analysis and optimisation along the way.

Also: cookie banner · CMP · consent banner

Consent management is the process of obtaining, recording, and honouring users' choices about the processing of their personal data, most visibly through the cookie and tracking consent banners required by privacy law.

Also: Linux container · OCI container · Docker container

A container is a process or group of processes running in isolation on a shared kernel, using namespaces for visibility isolation and cgroups for resource limits, packaged with its own filesystem and dependencies.

Also: context length · context size

The context window is the maximum number of tokens a language model can consider at once, encompassing both the input prompt and the generated output.

Also: Common Platform Enumeration

CPE (Common Platform Enumeration) is a structured naming scheme for identifying software, hardware, and operating systems in a machine-readable way, used to state precisely which products and versions a vulnerability affects.

Also: account takeover · ATO

Credential stuffing is an automated attack that takes username and password pairs leaked from one breach and tries them en masse against other services, exploiting the fact that many people reuse the same password across sites.

Also: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures · CVE ID · CVE identifier

CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is a public catalogue that assigns a unique identifier, such as CVE-2026-31337, to each publicly disclosed software vulnerability so that everyone can refer to the same flaw unambiguously.

Also: Common Vulnerability Scoring System · CVSS score · base score

CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) is an open standard that scores the technical severity of a vulnerability from 0.0 to 10.0, based on factors such as attack complexity, required privileges, and impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Also: information broker · people search site

A data broker is a company that collects personal information from public records, commercial transactions, apps, and online activity, then aggregates and sells it to other organisations — typically without any direct relationship with the individuals concerned.

Also: exfil · data theft

Data exfiltration is the unauthorised transfer of data out of an organisation's environment by an attacker, typically the final objective of an intrusion.

Also: DLP · data leak prevention

Data loss prevention (DLP) refers to tools and policies that detect and block sensitive information from leaving an organisation through channels such as email, cloud uploads, or removable media.

Also: privacy by design · collection limitation

Data minimisation is the principle that an organisation should collect and retain only the personal data actually necessary for a stated purpose, and no more, for no longer than needed.

Also: DPIA · privacy impact assessment · PIA

A data protection impact assessment (DPIA) is a structured evaluation of the privacy risks a proposed processing activity poses to individuals, together with the measures planned to mitigate them.

Also: DSAR · subject access request · privacy rights

Data subject rights are the legal entitlements individuals hold over their personal data, typically including the rights to access, correct, delete, port, and object to the processing of information held about them.

Also: layered security · defence in depth

Defense in depth is a security strategy that layers multiple independent controls so that the failure or bypass of any single control does not result in compromise.

Also: substitution attack · namespace confusion

Dependency confusion is a supply chain attack in which an attacker publishes a malicious package to a public registry using the same name as an organisation's internal private package, causing build tooling to fetch the attacker's version instead.

Also: DP · privacy budget · epsilon

Differential privacy is a mathematical framework that adds carefully calibrated statistical noise to data or query results, providing a provable guarantee that the presence or absence of any single individual has negligible effect on the output.

Also: data extortion · exfiltration extortion

Double extortion is a ransomware tactic in which attackers steal a copy of an organisation's data before encrypting it, so that refusing to pay risks both operational disruption and public release of the stolen information.

Also: breach detection gap · time to detect

Dwell time is the length of time an attacker remains undetected inside a compromised environment, measured from initial intrusion to detection.

Also: on-device AI · local inference

Edge AI is the practice of running AI models directly on end-user devices such as phones and laptops rather than on remote servers, keeping input data local to the device.

Also: Endpoint Detection and Response · XDR

EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) is security software installed on endpoints that continuously records process, file, and network activity, detects suspicious behaviour, and enables remote investigation and containment.

Also: vector embedding · text embedding · semantic vector

An embedding is a numerical vector representation of text, images, or other data, positioned in a high-dimensional space such that semantically similar items sit close together.

Also: data at rest encryption · disk encryption

Encryption at rest is the encryption of stored data — on disks, in databases, or in backups — so that physical access to the storage medium does not yield readable data.

Also: E2EE · E2E encryption

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system in which messages are encrypted on the sender's device and decrypted only on the recipient's, so that no intermediary — including the service provider — can read the content in transit or at rest on its servers.

Also: Exploit Prediction Scoring System

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) estimates the probability that a given vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days, expressed as a percentage between 0 and 100.

Also: exploit code · proof of concept · PoC

An exploit is code or a technique that takes advantage of a specific vulnerability to cause unintended behaviour, such as executing attacker-supplied code, bypassing authentication, or crashing a service.

Also: federated training · on-device training

Federated learning is a technique for training a shared model across many devices without centralising the training data: each device computes updates locally, and only those model updates — not the underlying data — are sent to a server for aggregation.

Also: finetuning · LoRA · PEFT · supervised fine-tuning

Fine-tuning is the process of further training a pre-trained model on a smaller, task-specific dataset to adapt its behaviour, style, or domain knowledge without training from scratch.

Also: perfect forward secrecy · PFS

Forward secrecy is a property of encryption protocols ensuring that if a long-term private key is later compromised, past recorded sessions still cannot be decrypted, because each session used ephemeral keys that were discarded afterwards.

Also: fuzz testing · coverage-guided fuzzing · AFL

Fuzzing is an automated testing technique that feeds a program large volumes of malformed, unexpected, or random input to discover crashes, hangs, and memory-safety violations.

Also: General Data Protection Regulation · EU data protection

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the European Union's data protection law, which governs how personal data of people in the EU may be collected and processed, and grants individuals rights over their data regardless of where the processing organisation is based.

Also: grounded generation · citation grounding

Grounding is the practice of tying a model's output to specific verifiable source material, so that claims can be traced to documents rather than resting on the model's parametric memory.

Also: confabulation · AI hallucination

A hallucination is output from an AI model that is fluent and confident but factually incorrect or entirely fabricated, such as an invented citation, a non-existent API method, or a plausible-sounding but false statistic.

Also: idempotent operation · idempotency key

An operation is idempotent if performing it multiple times produces the same result as performing it once, which allows a client to safely retry a request without risking duplicate side effects.

Also: IR · DFIR · security incident response

Incident response is the structured process an organisation follows to detect, contain, eradicate, and recover from a security incident, and to learn from it afterwards.

Also: IOC · IoC · indicators

An indicator of compromise (IOC) is an observable artifact — such as a file hash, IP address, domain, or registry key — that suggests a system may have been breached.

Also: model inference · serving · generation

Inference is the process of running a trained model to produce output for a given input — as distinct from training, which is the process of creating the model in the first place.

Also: init · PID 1 · systemd · SysVinit

The init system is the first user-space process started by the kernel at boot, running as PID 1, responsible for starting and supervising all other system services and handling shutdown.

Also: IAB · access broker

An initial access broker (IAB) is a criminal specialist who breaches organisations and then sells that access to other attackers, such as ransomware affiliates, rather than monetising the intrusion themselves.

Also: malicious insider · insider risk

An insider threat is a security risk originating from someone with legitimate authorised access to an organisation's systems, whether acting maliciously, negligently, or through a compromised account.

Also: AI jailbreak · safety bypass

A jailbreak is a prompt crafted to bypass an AI model's safety training and elicit output the model was trained to refuse, typically through roleplay framing, hypothetical scenarios, or obfuscated instructions.

Also: Linux kernel · monolithic kernel · kernel space

The kernel is the core of an operating system, responsible for managing memory, scheduling processes, and mediating all access between software and hardware. The Linux kernel is the component that makes a system 'Linux'.

Also: LKM · loadable kernel module · driver module

A kernel module is a piece of code that can be loaded into and unloaded from a running Linux kernel on demand, extending its functionality — most commonly with device drivers — without requiring a reboot or recompilation.

Also: Known Exploited Vulnerabilities · CISA KEV

The KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) catalog is a list maintained by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of vulnerabilities with confirmed evidence of active exploitation in the wild.

Also: model distillation · teacher-student

Knowledge distillation is a training technique in which a smaller student model learns to reproduce the behaviour of a larger teacher model, yielding a compact model that retains much of the teacher's capability.

Also: LLM · language model · foundation model

A large language model (LLM) is a neural network trained on vast quantities of text to predict likely continuations of a sequence, producing systems capable of generating coherent language, answering questions, and writing code.

Also: pivoting · east-west movement

Lateral movement is the process by which an attacker who has compromised one system moves through a network to reach additional systems, typically hunting for higher-value data or credentials.

Also: distro · Linux distro

A Linux distribution is a complete operating system built around the Linux kernel, bundling it with system libraries, a package manager, default utilities, and a curated set of software, along with policies for how all of it is maintained and updated.

Also: LTS · LTS release · extended support

Long-term support (LTS) designates a software release that will receive security patches and critical bug fixes for an extended period — typically several years — without introducing new features or breaking changes.

Also: malicious software · trojan · worm · rootkit

Malware is any software written to cause harm to a system, network, or user, including viruses, worms, trojans, rootkits, spyware, and ransomware.

Also: memory-safe language · memory safety bug

Memory safety is the property of a program being unable to access memory outside the bounds of what it legitimately owns, preventing entire vulnerability classes such as buffer overflows, use-after-free, and data races.

Also: communications metadata · traffic analysis

Metadata is the information surrounding a communication rather than its content — who contacted whom, when, for how long, from where, and how frequently — which remains visible even when the content itself is encrypted.

Also: network segmentation · east-west segmentation

Microsegmentation is the practice of dividing a network into small isolated zones with explicit policies governing traffic between them, so that a compromised system cannot freely communicate with unrelated systems.

Also: ATT&CK · ATT&CK framework · TTPs

MITRE ATT&CK is a public knowledge base that catalogues real-world adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures, organised into a matrix that maps how attackers progress through an intrusion.

Also: MCP

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that defines how AI applications connect to external data sources and tools, providing a common interface so that any compliant client can use any compliant server.

Also: MFA · 2FA · two-factor authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) requires two or more independent categories of evidence to verify identity — typically something you know, something you have, and something you are — so that a stolen password alone is insufficient to gain access.

Also: n day vulnerability · known vulnerability · one-day

An n-day is a vulnerability that has already been publicly disclosed and patched, but remains exploitable on systems that have not yet applied the update.

Also: Linux namespaces · PID namespace · network namespace

A Linux namespace is a kernel feature that gives a process an isolated view of a particular system resource — process IDs, network interfaces, mount points, hostnames — forming the primary isolation mechanism behind containers.

Also: National Vulnerability Database

The NVD (National Vulnerability Database) is the US government repository, maintained by NIST, that enriches published CVE records with CVSS severity scores, affected product identifiers, and references.

Also: telemetry · tracing · OpenTelemetry

Observability is the degree to which a system's internal state can be understood from its external outputs — logs, metrics, and traces — particularly for diagnosing problems nobody anticipated.

Also: local processing · client-side processing

On-device processing means performing computation locally on a user's own hardware rather than transmitting data to a remote server, so that the raw input never leaves the device.

Also: FOSS · free software · OSS

Open source software is software distributed under a licence that grants anyone the right to use, inspect, modify, and redistribute the source code, subject to conditions defined by that licence.

Also: open weights · open source model · local model

An open-weight model is one whose trained parameters are publicly downloadable, allowing anyone to run, inspect, fine-tune, and deploy it on their own infrastructure without calling an external API.

Also: apt · dnf · pacman · dependency resolution

A package manager is the tool that installs, updates, configures, and removes software on a Linux system, resolving dependencies automatically and verifying package integrity through cryptographic signatures.

Also: FIDO2 · WebAuthn · passwordless

A passkey is a phishing-resistant credential based on public-key cryptography that replaces passwords: the private key never leaves the user's device, and authentication is cryptographically bound to the legitimate site's domain.

Also: bcrypt · Argon2 · scrypt · password storage

Password hashing is the practice of storing passwords as the output of a deliberately slow, salted one-way function, so that a breach of the credential database does not immediately yield usable plaintext passwords.

Also: Update Tuesday · monthly patch cycle

Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of each month, on which Microsoft and several other major vendors release their scheduled batch of security updates, giving administrators a predictable cadence for planning maintenance.

Also: pentest · pen test · ethical hacking

Penetration testing is an authorised, time-boxed assessment in which security professionals attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in a defined target to demonstrate real-world impact and provide remediation guidance.

Also: phishing attack · credential phishing

Phishing is a social-engineering attack in which an adversary impersonates a trusted party — typically via email, SMS, or a cloned website — to trick a victim into revealing credentials, authorising a payment, or installing malware.

Also: PhaaS · phishing kit

Phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) is a subscription model in which criminal platforms sell ready-made phishing kits, hosting, and credential-capture infrastructure to customers who lack the skill to build them.

Also: PQC · quantum-resistant cryptography

Post-quantum cryptography refers to cryptographic algorithms designed to remain secure against attacks by quantum computers, which would break the public-key algorithms such as RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography that currently secure most internet traffic.

Also: PoLP · least privilege access

The principle of least privilege holds that every user, process, and system should be granted only the minimum permissions necessary to perform its function, and no more.

Also: privesc · local privilege escalation · LPE · elevation of privilege

Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a flaw or misconfiguration to gain a higher level of access than originally granted, such as moving from an unprivileged user account to administrator or root.

Also: prompting · chain of thought · few-shot prompting

Prompt engineering is the practice of structuring input to a language model — through instructions, examples, formatting, and reasoning scaffolds — to reliably obtain the desired output.

Also: indirect prompt injection · LLM injection

Prompt injection is an attack in which malicious instructions are embedded in content an AI system processes — a web page, document, or email — causing the model to follow the attacker's instructions instead of the application's.

Also: model quantization · INT8 · 4-bit quantization

Quantization reduces the numerical precision of a model's weights — for example from 16-bit floating point to 8-bit or 4-bit integers — shrinking memory requirements and speeding inference at some cost to output quality.

Also: crypto-ransomware · ransomware attack

Ransomware is malicious software that denies an organisation access to its own data — historically by encrypting it — and demands payment in exchange for restoring access or withholding publication of stolen data.

Also: RaaS

Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) is a criminal business model in which ransomware developers lease their malware and infrastructure to affiliates, who carry out the actual intrusions and share a percentage of ransom proceeds with the operators.

Also: throttling · token bucket · backpressure

Rate limiting restricts how many requests a client may make within a time window, protecting a service from overload, abuse, and runaway costs while ensuring capacity remains available to other users.

Also: red teaming · adversary simulation · purple team

A red team is a group that simulates realistic adversary behaviour against an organisation to test not just its technical defences but its ability to detect and respond to an intrusion in progress.

Also: RCE · arbitrary code execution · remote code exec

Remote code execution (RCE) is a class of vulnerability that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code on a target system over a network, without physical access to that machine.

Also: deterministic build · bit-for-bit reproducibility

A reproducible build is one where compiling the same source code with the same environment always produces a byte-for-byte identical binary, allowing anyone to independently verify that a distributed binary genuinely corresponds to its published source.

Also: coordinated disclosure · CVD · vulnerability disclosure

Responsible disclosure, also called coordinated vulnerability disclosure, is the practice of privately reporting a vulnerability to the affected vendor and allowing a defined period for a fix before publishing details.

Also: RESTful · GraphQL · gRPC

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for networked applications in which resources are identified by URLs and manipulated through standard HTTP methods, with each request carrying all context needed to process it.

Also: RAG · retrieval augmented generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a technique in which relevant documents are retrieved from an external knowledge source and supplied to a language model as context, so that its response is grounded in specific retrieved material rather than parametric memory alone.

Also: right to be forgotten · RTBF · data deletion

The right to erasure, commonly called the right to be forgotten, allows individuals to request deletion of their personal data in defined circumstances, such as when it is no longer necessary for the purpose it was collected for or consent has been withdrawn.

Also: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback · preference tuning

RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) is a training technique that aligns a model's behaviour with human preferences by training a reward model on human comparisons of outputs, then optimising the language model against that reward signal.

Also: Rust language · borrow checker · ownership model

Rust is a systems programming language that guarantees memory safety without garbage collection, using a compile-time ownership and borrowing model to eliminate entire classes of bugs including use-after-free and data races.

Also: Software Bill of Materials

An SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) is a formal, machine-readable inventory of every component and dependency contained in a piece of software, including version numbers and licence information.

Also: seccomp-bpf · syscall filtering

seccomp is a Linux kernel feature that restricts which system calls a process may make, reducing the kernel attack surface available to a compromised or untrusted program.

Also: UEFI Secure Boot · verified boot

Secure Boot is a UEFI firmware feature that verifies the cryptographic signature of each component in the boot chain — bootloader, kernel, and drivers — refusing to execute anything not signed by a trusted key.

Also: SOC · security operations centre

A security operations center (SOC) is the team and function responsible for continuously monitoring an organisation's environment for security threats, triaging alerts, and initiating incident response.

Also: SELinux · AppArmor · MAC · mandatory access control

SELinux and AppArmor are Linux mandatory access control systems that confine processes to explicitly permitted actions, so that even a process running as root is limited to what its policy allows.

Also: vector search · neural search · hybrid search

Semantic search retrieves results based on meaning rather than keyword matching, using embeddings to find documents conceptually related to a query even when they share no literal terms.

Also: Security Information and Event Management

A SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system centralises log and event data from across an organisation's infrastructure, correlating it to detect suspicious activity and support investigation.

Also: Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts

SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts) is a security framework that defines graduated levels of build integrity, describing increasingly rigorous requirements for how software artifacts are produced and verified.

Also: human hacking · pretexting

Social engineering is the manipulation of people into performing actions or disclosing information that compromises security, exploiting trust, authority, urgency, or helpfulness rather than technical vulnerabilities.

Also: SSCS · supply chain integrity

Software supply chain security is the practice of verifying the integrity and provenance of every component, tool, and process that contributes to a piece of software, from source dependencies through the build system to distribution.

Also: SAST · linting · static application security testing

Static analysis examines source code without executing it, detecting bugs, security vulnerabilities, and style violations by reasoning about possible program behaviours.

Also: software supply chain attack · third-party compromise

A supply chain attack compromises an organisation indirectly by targeting a trusted supplier, dependency, or software update mechanism, so that malicious code arrives through a channel the victim already trusts.

Also: mass surveillance · surveillance capitalism · commercial spyware

Surveillance in the privacy context refers to the systematic monitoring of individuals' communications, movements, or behaviour, whether conducted by states for security purposes or by companies for commercial ones.

Also: syscall · kernel API

A system call is the mechanism by which a user-space program requests a service from the kernel — such as opening a file, allocating memory, or sending network data — crossing the privilege boundary between application and kernel.

Also: systemctl · journald · systemd unit

systemd is the init system and service manager used by most major Linux distributions, handling service startup and supervision, logging, device management, and system state through a unified set of components.

Also: TTX · incident simulation

A tabletop exercise is a discussion-based simulation in which a team walks through their response to a hypothetical security incident, testing decision-making and procedures without touching production systems.

Also: tech debt · code debt

Technical debt is the accumulated future cost of choosing an expedient implementation over a better one, analogous to financial debt in that it carries ongoing interest in the form of slower development and higher defect rates.

Also: tracking cookie · cross-site cookie

A third-party cookie is a cookie set by a domain other than the one shown in the address bar, historically the primary mechanism allowing advertising networks to track individual users across unrelated websites.

Also: proactive threat detection · cyber threat hunting

Threat hunting is the proactive search for attackers already present in an environment, driven by hypotheses about adversary behaviour rather than by alerts from automated detection tools.

Also: Transport Layer Security · SSL · HTTPS

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the cryptographic protocol that encrypts data in transit between clients and servers, providing confidentiality, integrity, and server authentication — most visibly as the S in HTTPS.

Also: tokenization · tokenizer · BPE

A token is the atomic unit of text that a language model processes — typically a common word, a word fragment, or a punctuation mark — produced by splitting input text through a tokenizer before the model sees it.

Also: data provenance · dataset transparency

Training data provenance is documentation of where the data used to train a model came from, including its sources, licensing status, and any known rights disputes.

Also: transformer architecture · attention mechanism

The transformer is a neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, that uses self-attention to weigh the relevance of every input token against every other, and which underpins essentially all modern large language models.

Also: static typing · type checking · TypeScript

A type system is a set of rules that assigns types to program constructs and verifies their consistent use, catching a class of errors before the program runs in statically-typed languages, or during execution in dynamically-typed ones.

Also: package typosquatting · URL typosquatting

Typosquatting is the practice of registering package names or domains that closely resemble legitimate ones, relying on user typos or inattention to deliver malicious content to victims who intended to reach the real thing.

Also: UAF · dangling pointer

A use-after-free is a memory-safety vulnerability in which a program continues to use a pointer to memory that has already been released, allowing an attacker who can control what occupies that memory to influence program behaviour.

Also: vector store · vector index · ANN search

A vector database is a data store optimised for indexing and querying high-dimensional embedding vectors, typically using approximate nearest neighbour algorithms to find the most semantically similar items quickly.

Also: patch management · VM program

Vulnerability management is the ongoing process of identifying, prioritising, remediating, and verifying fixes for security weaknesses across an organisation's systems and software.

Also: Wayland compositor · Wayland protocol

Wayland is a display server protocol for Linux designed to replace the X Window System, in which a single compositor handles rendering, input, and window management rather than the client-server split X uses.

Also: HTTP callback · event notification

A webhook is an HTTP request sent automatically from one system to another when an event occurs, allowing the receiver to react immediately rather than repeatedly polling for changes.

Also: X Window System · Xorg · X server

X11 is the long-standing display server protocol for Unix-like systems, providing a network-transparent client-server architecture in which applications connect to an X server that manages display output and input devices.

Also: zero trust architecture · ZTA · BeyondCorp

Zero trust is a security architecture that removes implicit trust based on network location, requiring every request to be authenticated, authorised, and continuously validated regardless of whether it originates inside or outside the corporate network.

Also: 0-day · zero day vulnerability · zero-day exploit

A zero-day is a software vulnerability that attackers know about and exploit before the vendor has released a patch, leaving defenders zero days to prepare a fix.

Also: zero knowledge · client-side encryption

A zero-knowledge architecture is one in which a service provider stores user data but holds no ability to decrypt it, because encryption and key management happen entirely on the user's device.