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The Rietta Glossary

Cybersecurity and accessibility terms, defined and sourced.

As part of our effort to be an educational resource, Rietta maintains this glossary for terms that come up on the blog, our video learning library and in our other published works. This is the place we will share neutral definitions of terms of art in the field as well as for terms that our team may have coined.

We have had the experience of the web changing out from under us. Places were cited that are no longer available. It is our sincere hope that this resource will be available well into the future.

This resource is not exhaustive but is a continual work in progress.

If during your review of this work, you notice a substantial error, we welcome corrections or discussion via our e-mail form.

A

Abuser Story Security
An abuser story is a user story written from the point of view of a malicious adversary. Abuser stories are used in agile software development to define activities the software should actively block or mitigate, proven by automated regression tests.
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Law, Accessibility
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a U.S. civil rights law, enacted July 26, 1990, that prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, state and local government services, public accommodations, and telecommunications.
Archived Web Content Exception Law
The archived web content exception is a provision of the U.S. Department of Justice’s ADA Title II web accessibility rule, 28 CFR § 35.201(a), that exempts web content meeting four criteria defined in 28 CFR § 35.104 from the rule’s WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA requirements.
Authentication Security
Authentication is the security property of verifying that a user, process, or device is who or what it claims to be, and that it is authorized to access a given resource.
Availability Security
Availability is the security property of ensuring timely and reliable access to and use of information and systems by authorized users.

C

CIANA Security
CIANA is an acronym for five information assurance properties: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Non-Repudiation, and Authentication. It extends the three-property CIA triad.
Confidentiality Security
Confidentiality is the security property of preserving authorized restrictions on information access and disclosure, so that information is not revealed to people, processes, or devices that aren’t authorized to see it.
Conformance vs. Compliance Accessibility, Law
Conformance is a technical claim that content satisfies all the requirements of a standard such as WCAG. Compliance is a legal status: meeting the obligations of a law or regulation such as ADA Title II, which may require conformance to a standard by reference.

D

Document Corpus (Accessibility) Accessibility
In document accessibility, a document corpus is the complete body of documents an organization publishes, treated as a unit of assessment in its own right. Some findings, such as the same non-descriptive title on every document or defects traced to a shared production workflow, exist only at the corpus level and cannot be seen by reviewing files one at a time.
Document Language Accessibility
In document accessibility, the document language is the default human language declared in a file’s metadata (for a PDF, the /Lang entry in the document catalog), which screen readers use to choose pronunciation. WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 3.1.1 requires that it be programmatically determinable.
Document Provenance (Accessibility) Accessibility
In document accessibility, document provenance is the specific business process, template, and tools that produced a document, traced so that accessibility defects shared by many documents can be attributed to a common source and corrected there.
Document Title Accessibility
In document accessibility, the document title is the title stored in a file’s metadata (for a PDF, the Title entry in the document information dictionary) that viewers and assistive technology present to identify the document. WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 2.4.2 requires that it describe the document’s topic or purpose.

I

Integrity Security
Integrity is the security property of guarding information against improper modification or destruction, so that data has not been altered in an unauthorized or undetected way since it was created, transmitted, or stored.

M

McCumber Cube Security
The McCumber Cube is an information security model that crosses three information states (transmission, storage, processing) with three security characteristics (confidentiality, integrity, availability) and three kinds of security measures (technology; policy and practice; education, training, and awareness), producing 27 cells that each describe an area a system must address.

N

Non-Repudiation Security
Non-repudiation is the security property that prevents a party from credibly denying an action they took, by preserving evidence of who did what, when, and where.

P

Preexisting Conventional Electronic Documents Exception Law
The preexisting conventional electronic documents exception is a provision of the U.S. Department of Justice’s ADA Title II web accessibility rule, 28 CFR § 35.201(b), that exempts PDF, word processor, presentation, and spreadsheet files made available before a public entity’s compliance date, unless they are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in its services, programs, or activities.

R

Remediation Security, Accessibility
Remediation is the correction of an identified deficiency. In cybersecurity, it means fixing or mitigating a vulnerability. In digital accessibility, it means modifying content, such as a PDF, so that it meets accessibility requirements.

T

Threat Modeling Security
Threat modeling is a structured process for identifying what a system must protect, enumerating what can go wrong, and prioritizing mitigations by relative risk.

W

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Accessibility
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for making web content accessible to people with disabilities, organized as testable success criteria at three conformance levels: A, AA, and AAA.