Glossary

Peer-to-peer

A multinational Pacific cybersecurity network which the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ASD’s ACSC) is a member of. PaCSON promotes closer sharing of cybersecurity threat information, tools, techniques and ideas between Pacific nations.

Security measures that are applied within a network and require limited human interaction. Passive defence includes logging and monitoring mechanisms, and implementation of tools and processes to harden networks including firewalls, application hardening, patching procedures and antivirus software.

A credential that uses public-key cryptography to authenticate a human user to a system or online service. A passkey typically consists of a private key stored on, or accessible through, a computer, mobile device or security key, with a corresponding public key held by the system or online service being authenticated to. Passkey authentication may provide single-factor or multi-factor authentication. It provides multi-factor authentication where use of the private key requires a separate activation factor, such as a password or biometric.

A sequence of words or text used to control access to a computer system, program or data. A passphrase is similar to a password in usage, but is generally longer for added security.

A sequence of characters used for authentication. Passwords consisting solely of numbers are also known as personal identification numbers, while passwords consisting solely of a sequence of words are also known as passphrases.

The use of different character sets, such as lower-case alphabetical characters (a-z), upper-case alphabetical characters (A-Z), numeric characters (0-9) and special characters.

A type of software that offers greater security through the capability to generate unique, strong, easily-changed passwords for all online accounts and the secure encrypted storage of those passwords either through a local or cloud-based vault.

An attack that attempts to access a large number of accounts with some commonly-used passwords.

Authentication that does not involve the use of something people know. Passwordless authentication may be single-factor or multi-factor, with the later often referred to as passwordless multi-factor authentication.