NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) hopes to bring some order to the sometimes inconsistent and often confusing world of IT (information technology) acronyms and abbreviations by publishing a glossary of commonly used terms.
NIST Interagency Report (“NISTIR”) 7581 , “System and Network Security Acronyms and Abbreviations,” runs the alphabetical gamut from A (address resource record type) to ZSK (zone signing key).
“The capitalization, spelling and definitions of acronyms and abbreviations frequently vary among publications,” the report states. Some abbreviations, such as WWW, have a universally recognized meaning, while others have multiple definitions. For instance, MAC can stand for mandatory access control, Media Access Control, Medium Access Control or message authentication code. Others might contain an internal logic but can be confusing at first glance. For instance, Triple DES (Data Encryption Standard) is often abbreviated as 3DES.
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