Glossary

A fast reference for the vocabulary in the lecture and workshop.

Foundations

CIA Triad — Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability; the three properties security protects.
Threat / Vulnerability / Exploit / Risk — a potential cause of harm / a weakness / the technique that uses it / expected loss (likelihood × impact).
Attack surface — the sum of all the ways into a system.
Least privilege — grant the minimum access needed, for the minimum time.
Defense in depth — layered controls so one failure isn’t fatal.
Assume breach — design as if the attacker is already inside.

Symmetric / Asymmetric encryption — one shared key (fast, bulk) vs. a public/private key pair (key exchange, signatures).
Hashing — one-way fingerprint for integrity and password storage.
PKI / TLS — certificate-based trust that secures HTTPS.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) — quantum-resistant algorithms; migration driven by “harvest now, decrypt later.”
MFA / Passkeys / FIDO2 — multi-factor and passwordless authentication.
AuthN vs AuthZ — authentication (who you are) vs. authorization (what you may do).

Kill Chain / MITRE ATT&CK — models of the stages and techniques of an intrusion.
Phishing / Social engineering — manipulating humans into access or action.
Ransomware — encrypt-and-extort, now with leak/DDoS “double/triple extortion.”
OWASP Top 10 — the canonical list of web application risks.
Supply chain attack — compromising a dependency/vendor to reach everyone downstream.
Prompt injection — hijacking an LLM’s instructions through its inputs.
Model / data poisoning — corrupting an AI system’s training or retrieval data.

Mythos — Claude Mythos Preview (Anthropic, April 2026); a model with unprecedented autonomous offensive cyber capability, restricted under Project Glasswing.
Agentic AI — AI that reasons, plans, and acts with tools, autonomously.
Zero-day — a vulnerability with no available patch when first exploited.

SOC — Security Operations Center.
SIEM / SOAR / EDR / XDR — log correlation / orchestration & automation / endpoint & extended detection and response.
MTTD / MTTR — mean time to detect / respond.
Autonomous SOC — a SOC where agentic AI runs triage, hunting, and remediation, with humans on the loop.
Zero Trust — “never trust, always verify”; no implicit trust from network location.
Shift left — move security earlier into the development lifecycle.
GRC — Governance, Risk, and Compliance.

Trinetra — “Security for Builders”; the platform used in the lab to analyze code and open PRs with fixes. Trinetra = “three-eyed.”
Triage — deciding which findings are real, severe, and worth fixing.
PR (Pull Request) — a proposed, reviewable code change.