AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)
Encryption standard replacing DES. NIST chose Rijndael as the block cipher for AES.

American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
A non-profit, privately funded membership organization that coordinates the development of U.S. voluntary national standards and is the U.S. representative to non-treaty international standards-setting entities including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

Authentication
Authentication is the process of confirming the correctness of the claimed identity.



Back Door
A feature programmers often build into programs to allow special privileges normally denied to users of the program. Often programmers build back doors so they can fix bugs or for use by service technicians. If hackers or others learn about a back door, the feature may pose a security risk.

Back Orifice
Back Orifice is a program developed and released by The Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc). It is not a virus; it is a remote administration tool with potential for malicious misuse. If installed by a hacker, it has the ability to give a remote attacker full system administrator privileges to your system. It can also 'sniff' passwords and confidential data and quietly e-mail them to a remote site. Back Orifice is an extensible program - programmers can change and "enhance" it over time.

Biometrics
Biometrics pertain to the measurement of the human body, relating to means of authentication based on patterns unique to an individual's body, such as fingerprints, voiceprint, retinal patterns, and other such physical measures.

Birthday Attack
A brute-force attack used to find collisions. It gets its name from the surprising result that the probability of two or more people in a group of 23 sharing the same birthday is greater than 1/2. See Birthday Phenomenon.

Birthday Phenomenon
The phenomenon stating that, for a category size of 365 (the number of days in a year), after only 23 people are gathered, the probability is greater than 0.5 that at least two people have a common birthday (month and day). Note: The birthday phenomenon applied to DES encryption means that where category size is 264, this same probability of a repeat (match) occurs at approximately r=232. The theory behind this principle applies that for a 64-bit block encryption operation with a fixed key, if one has a text dictionary of 232 plaintext/ciphertext pairs and 232 blocks of ciphertext produced from random input, then it should be expected that one block of unknown ciphertext will be found in the dictionary.

Bit Bucket
The universal data sink. Discarded, lost or destroyed data is said to have gone to the bit bucket. Sometimes amplified as The Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.

Black Hat/White Hat Hackers
There are two kinds of hackers: Black Hats and White Hats. Black Hats illegally crack systems for malicious reasons. White Hats legally probe and test for security flaws and IT research.

Block Cipher
A block cipher encrypts one block of data at a time.

Buffer Overflow
A buffer overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (temporary data storage area) than it was intended to hold. Since buffers are created to contain a finite amount of data, the extra information - which has to go somewhere - can overflow into adjacent buffers, corrupting or overwriting the valid data held in them.

Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
A Business Continuity Plan is a plan for emergency response, backup operations and post-disaster recovery steps to ensure the availability of critical resources and facilitate the continuity of operations in an emergency situation.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
A Business Impact Analysis determines what levels of impact to a system are tolerable.

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