National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a unit of the US Commerce Department. Formerly known as the National Bureau of Standards, NIST promotes and maintains measurement standards. It also has active programs for encouraging and assisting industry and science to develop and use these standards.

NERC
North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC ) is an organization whose members are drawn from all segments of the electric industry: investor-owned utilities; federal power agencies; rural electric cooperatives; state, municipal and provincial utilities; independent power producers; power marketers; and end-use customers in the United States, Canada, and a portion of Baja California Norte, Mexico. NERC sets standards for the reliable operation and planning of the bulk electric system and monitors, assesses, and enforces compliance with those standards.

Non-Repudiation
Non-repudiation is the ability for a system to prove that a specific user and only that specific user sent a message and that it hasn't been modified.

NOPR
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

NSA
The National Security Agency. A security-conscious U. S. government agency whose mission is to decipher and monitor foreign communications.



PES
IEEE's Power Engineering Society

Patch
A patch is a small update released by a software manufacturer to fix bugs in existing programs.

Patching
Patching is the process of updating software to a different version.

Penetration Testing
Penetration testing is used to test the external perimeter security of a network or facility.

Phisher
A malicious user or website that deceives people into revealing personal information, such as account passwords and credit card numbers. A phisher typically uses deceptive e-mail messages or online advertisements as bait to lure unsuspecting users to fraudulent websites, where the users are then tricked into providing personal information.

Phreaking
1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls).
2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks).

Plaintext
Ordinary readable text before being encrypted into ciphertext or after being decrypted.

Public Key
The publicly-disclosed component of a pair of cryptographic keys used for asymmetric cryptography.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
A PKI (public key infrastructure) enables users of a basically unsecured public network such as the Internet to securely and privately exchange data and money through the use of a public and a private cryptographic key pair that is obtained and shared through a trusted authority. The public key infrastructure provides for a digital certificate that can identify an individual or an organization and directory services that can store and, when necessary, revoke the certificates.

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