Information security dictionary

Urs Gattiker published a new information security dictionary this year; it is subtitled, “Defining the terms that define security for e-business, Internet, information and wireless technology.”

Gattiker is a powerhouse in the information security field. He has been a prime mover in the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR) since 1994; a professor at distinguished universities all over the world (Denmark, Australia, Canada, Germany, the U.S.); founder of security companies (Bullguard); and author of numerous technical texts in security and information technology. He currently holds the Parcham Foundation Professorship in Management and Information Sciences at the International School of New Media of the University of Lübeck in Germany. He has been a personal and professional friend since I met him at EICAR meetings in the mid-1990s.

The new dictionary is a small (9.5 inches by 6.3 inches), beautifully bound book suitable for academic and corporate libraries. As explained in the introduction, it “defines over 1200 of the most commonly used words in security field, with particular attention to those terms used most often in forensics, malware, viruses, vulnerabilities, and IPv6.” Sections for each letter are marked stepwise on the edge of the pages for easy navigation of the dictionary.

Despite its modest self-description, the book is more than simply a dictionary; perhaps we can call it a teaching dictionary. Entries include not only definitions but also commentary. For example, the very first entry, “Abend / Application Crash” is as follows: “(derived from ‘abnormal end’) is where an applications program aborts, or terminated abruptly and unexpectedly. One of the prime reasons for thorough testing of an organization’s application systems is to verify that the software works as expected. A significant risk to data is that, if an application crashes it can also corrupt the data file which was open at the time.”

Some entries are extensive enough to qualify as short encyclopedia articles. For example, “Firewall” and “Firewall Code” extend over three pages and provide an overview of firewall types and applications extending even to suggestions on configuration. Similarly, “Intrusion Detection” has a helpful table of IDS-related vocabulary spanning four pages.

Many of the definitions are charmingly imaginative. For example, one definition begins, “Phishing is hacker lingo for fishing, whereby a million books are put into the water using Spam to see who bites.”

Some of the entries are unusually blunt in conveying the editor’s opinion – quite rare for a dictionary. For example, in the “phishing” entry, the author writes: “The above illustrates that privacy legislation in the USA may have little teeth if the courts do not protect invasion. If firms do what Chase did [selling clients’ personal information to telemarketers], we will have many annoying calls during the early evening hours trying to sell us stuff we do not want. Then it becomes a pest[;] maybe what is needed is that the victim does not have to claim damages but that the violator would face stiff fines and criminal penalties.”

The book includes about 25 pages of densely printed pointers to security reference materials including online databases, other dictionaries and encyclopedias, useful Web sites, laws, regulations, standards, best practices, tools, awareness materials and advisories.

There are some minor problems with this first edition; some of the English is a bit awkward and I did find a few entries with garbled text.  In correspondence with me, Gattiker assured me that he has already started a list of corrections for a second edition. 

However, on the whole, I’m delighted to see Gattiker’s work and look forward to a long print run and many future editions.