ICSP CS 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 process of choosing and applying options to modify risk: mitigate, transfer, avoid, or accept. Each option changes likelihood, impact, or both, and should be documented with an owner.

The risk that remains after controls and other treatments have been applied. It must be compared against risk appetite and formally accepted by an accountable manager.

The level of risk that exists before any controls are applied. Comparing it with residual risk shows how much protection current controls actually provide.

Ranking risks using descriptive scales such as high, medium, and low, often through expert judgment. It is fast and suits screening, but results are subjective and hard to aggregate precisely.

A study identifying critical business processes, their dependencies, and the harm caused by disruption over time. It produces recovery targets that drive continuity and disaster recovery planning.

The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time before an incident. It sets how often backups or replication must occur for a process.

The target duration within which a business process or system must be restored after disruption. It drives architecture choices such as redundancy and failover design.

Granting each user, process, or service only the access needed to perform its function, and no more. It limits the damage from compromised accounts and insider mistakes.

Dividing a sensitive task among multiple people so no single person can complete a fraudulent or damaging action alone. It is a preventive administrative control.

Requiring two authorized individuals to act together to complete a critical operation, such as safe access or key recovery. It protects against unilateral abuse or error.

Assigning permissions to job roles rather than to individuals, then assigning users to roles. It simplifies administration and supports least privilege at scale.

The gradual accumulation of access rights as a user changes roles without old permissions being removed. Periodic access reviews are the standard remedy.

An arrangement where a trusted identity provider authenticates a user and asserts that identity to another organization's service, avoiding duplicate credentials across domains.

An XML statement issued by an identity provider describing a subject's authentication, attributes, or authorization, consumed by a service provider during federated login.

An authentication scheme letting a user log in once and reach multiple applications without re-entering credentials. It reduces password fatigue but concentrates risk in the primary credential.

A ticket-based network authentication protocol using a trusted key distribution center. Tickets with limited lifetimes let clients prove identity to services without resending passwords.

Storing copies of cryptographic keys with a trusted third party so data can be recovered if the key holder is unavailable. It trades confidentiality against availability and requires strict controls.

A trusted entity that issues and signs digital certificates binding a public key to an identity, and that can revoke certificates when binding is no longer valid.

A signed list published by a certificate authority naming certificates that are revoked before their expiry. Clients check it, or use OCSP, to reject untrusted certificates.

The policies, roles, and systems that issue, distribute, validate, and revoke public key certificates, enabling trustworthy key exchange and digital signatures at scale.

A block cipher mode where each plaintext block is XORed with the previous ciphertext block before encryption. It hides patterns but requires an unpredictable initialization vector and serial processing.

A non-secret value combined with the key so identical plaintexts encrypt differently. It must be unique per message and, for many modes, unpredictable.

A cipher mode that provides both confidentiality and integrity, detecting tampering with ciphertext or associated data. It prevents chosen-ciphertext attacks that plain modes allow.

A keyed integrity check built from a cryptographic hash, letting parties verify that a message came from someone holding the shared key and was not altered.

A value produced with a private key that others verify with the corresponding public key, proving origin and integrity and providing non-repudiation.

Rewriting IP addresses and ports as packets cross a boundary, letting many internal hosts share public addresses. It hides internal topology but complicates end-to-end protocols.

A network segment between an untrusted network and the internal network that hosts externally reachable services under stricter filtering, limiting exposure if those hosts are compromised.

A firewall that inspects traffic beyond addresses and ports, identifying applications and users and applying intrusion prevention and threat intelligence inline.

A tunnel that encrypts and authenticates traffic between endpoints or sites over an untrusted network, giving remote users or branches private connectivity.

A suite of protocols that authenticates and encrypts IP packets, commonly used for site-to-site tunnels and host-to-host protection. It operates at the network layer.

A dedicated chip that stores keys and measurements and performs cryptographic operations, enabling secure boot attestation and hardware-bound disk encryption keys.

A firmware process that verifies signatures of boot components before execution, blocking unauthorized bootloaders and rootkits from loading early in startup.

Layering independent controls across people, process, and technology so that failure of one control does not expose the whole system.

An authorized, goal-driven simulation of an attacker against agreed scope, intended to demonstrate exploitable weaknesses and validate whether controls work in practice.

An automated check that compares systems against known weakness signatures and configuration baselines. It finds candidates for review but does not prove exploitability.

A written agreement defining scope, timing, permitted techniques, escalation contacts, and handling of findings before a security test begins, protecting both tester and target.

A platform that centralizes logs, correlates events across sources, and alerts on suspicious patterns, supporting detection and later forensic reconstruction.

Documented roles, phases, and communication paths for detecting, containing, eradicating, and recovering from security incidents, plus lessons learned afterward.

A documented, unbroken record of who handled evidence, when, and for what purpose, so that findings remain admissible and defensible.

Analyzing source or binary code without executing it to find insecure patterns such as injection flaws. It scales well but produces false positives needing triage.

Testing a running application from outside to find exploitable behavior, including authentication and configuration weaknesses that static analysis cannot see.

Identifying third-party and open-source components in a build and checking them against known vulnerability and license data, since most code is now assembled rather than written.

Assigning labels such as public, internal, confidential, or restricted to information so that handling, retention, and protection rules follow the label rather than ad hoc judgment.

Residual data left on storage media after deletion or formatting. It requires overwriting, degaussing, or destruction before media is reused or released.

Tools and policies that inspect content in motion, in use, and at rest to detect and block unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information.