SCLE Module 6 key terms

The amount and type of risk an organization is willing to accept in pursuit of its objectives, set by senior leadership and used to judge whether identified risks need treatment.

The acceptable variation in outcomes around a stated risk appetite, often expressed as quantitative thresholds that trigger escalation or corrective action.

The risk remaining after controls and countermeasures have been applied, which management must formally accept or treat further.

The process of selecting and implementing options to modify risk: mitigate, transfer, avoid, or accept, each documented with owners and target dates.

A living record of identified risks with owners, likelihood, impact, treatment plans, and status, used to track and report exposure over time.

Assigning labels such as public, internal, confidential, or restricted to information so handling, access, and protection requirements scale with sensitivity.

The senior accountable role that decides classification, access rules, and acceptable use for a data set, usually a business manager rather than IT staff.

The operational role that implements and maintains the technical controls protecting data, such as backups, encryption, and access provisioning, on the owner's behalf.

Residual data left on storage media after deletion or reformatting, addressed by overwriting, degaussing, cryptographic erasure, or physical destruction before reuse or disposal.

A process that renders media safe for reuse or release by removing data so it cannot be recovered, with method chosen based on media type and sensitivity.

An abstract security component that mediates every access by subjects to objects and must be tamper-proof, always invoked, and small enough to be verified.

The totality of hardware, firmware, and software components that enforce the security policy; its correctness determines whether the system can be trusted.

The concrete implementation of the reference monitor concept, comprising the hardware and software elements that enforce access control decisions.

A confidentiality model with no-read-up and no-write-down rules plus a discretionary matrix, preventing subjects from reading higher classifications or leaking data downward.

An integrity model using no-read-down and no-write-up rules so subjects cannot be corrupted by lower-integrity data or contaminate higher-integrity objects.

A communication path that violates the system's security policy by signaling through timing or storage resources not intended for data transfer.

A seven-layer reference framework describing network functions from physical signaling through application services, used to place protocols and controls.

Dividing a network into zones separated by filtering devices so compromise or broadcast traffic in one zone cannot freely reach more sensitive zones.

A design principle that treats no network location as inherently trusted, requiring continuous verification of identity and least-privilege access for every request.

A cryptographic protocol providing encrypted, integrity-protected, mutually authenticated channels between clients and servers, typically on HTTPS connections.

Granting users and processes only the access needed for their defined tasks, for the shortest time necessary, reducing the impact of misuse or compromise.

Splitting a sensitive task across multiple people so no single individual can complete a fraudulent or damaging action alone without detection.

Controls and tooling that vault, rotate, and monitor administrative credentials, brokering elevated sessions and recording activity for accountability.

An arrangement where a trusted identity provider asserts a user's identity to other services via standards such as SAML or OpenID Connect, avoiding duplicate credentials.

Authentication architecture in which one successful login grants access to multiple applications, improving usability but concentrating risk on the primary credential.

An authorized, goal-driven simulation of attacker techniques against defined scope, producing evidence and remediation guidance rather than a simple vulnerability list.

Automated discovery of known weaknesses and misconfigurations across assets, valuable for coverage and trending but not a substitute for exploit-based testing.

A written agreement defining scope, timing, permitted techniques, escalation contacts, and legal authorization for a security assessment before testing begins.

A reported finding that does not actually represent an exploitable weakness, consuming remediation effort and eroding trust in the detection tooling.

A real weakness or intrusion that detection tooling fails to report, creating unearned confidence in controls and leaving exposure unaddressed.

The staged process of preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned used to manage security incidents consistently.

Documented, unbroken record of who handled evidence, when, and why, preserving its integrity so it remains admissible in legal or disciplinary proceedings.

Documented procedures for sustaining critical functions during disruption, including alternate sites, manual workarounds, and communication paths, distinct from disaster recovery.

The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, which drives backup frequency and replication design decisions.

Integrating security activities such as threat modeling, code review, and security testing into each phase of software development rather than adding them after release.

A structured analysis of how data flows through a system and where an attacker could act, used to prioritize design-level mitigations before code is written.

Checking and constraining untrusted input on the server side so malformed or malicious data cannot alter logic, queries, or command execution.

A signed structure binding a public key to an identity, issued by a certificate authority and used to authenticate parties and enable encrypted sessions.