Glossary
This is the Glossary for Totem’s course Secure Messaging Apps
Anonymity: When the real author of a message is not shown. Anonymity can be implemented to make it very difficult to find out the real author of a message.
Attacker (or Adversary): Someone that wants to undermine your security goals.
Cipher text: Encrypted text. Plaintext is what you have before encryption, cipher text is the encrypted result.
Compartmentalization: In matters concerning information security, whether public or private sector, compartmentalization is the limiting of access to information to persons or other entities who need to know it in order to perform certain tasks.
Computer: A device, usually electronic, that processes data according to a set of instructions. The digital computer stores data in discrete units and performs arithmetical and logical operations at very high speed.
Data: Individual facts, statistics or items of information.
Device: A machine or tool used for a specific task, like a computer or a mobile phone.
Decryption: The act of combining cipher text and a key to convert it back to plain text.
Encryption: The act of taking plain text and a key and converting it into cipher text.
Encryption Key: A random string created explicitly for scrambling and unscrambling data.
Hovering: Placing a mouse over a link without clicking.
Information Security: A process of maintaining confidentiality, ensuring integrity and assuring availability of data you want to protect.
Internet: A global system of interconnected computer networks that use protocols to link devices enabling them to receive, or transmit information.
Metadata: While data is the content of your message and metadata is the context of that message, such as your location, the time you are visiting certain pages, your browser, etc. Metadata can be much more revealing than data, especially when collected in large quantities.
Network: A collection of nodes capable of receiving and transmitting information.
Plain text: A text that is not computationally tagged, specially formatted, or written in code.
Protocols: A set of established rules that dictates how to format, transmit and receive data so network devices - such as servers and routers - can communicate regardless of the differences in their underlying infrastructures, designs or standard.
Server: A computer that makes services, as access to data files, programs, and peripheral devices, available to workstations on a network.
Software: Anything that is not hardware but is used with hardware, as the programs that can be used with a particular computer system.
Tamper: A deliberate action aimed at weakening a polity, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction.
Transport Layer Security (TLS): A cryptographic protocol that provides communications security over a computer network to establish an encrypted link between a server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the server and browsers remains private and integral.
User: A person who uses a computer.
Wi-Fi: The name of a popular wireless networking technology that uses radio waves to provide wireless high-speed Internet and network connection.
Wi-Fi/Router: Or a wireless router is a device that is used to provide access to the Internet or a private computer network.