Cyber Dictionary

A vocabulary of technology and cybersecurity, defined plainly — and a library of open sources you can build with.

Live site: https://ethical-tech-colab.github.io/cyber-dictionary/

Two rooms, one site.

1. The Dictionary

A working dictionary of the terms, protocols, attacks and frameworks that come up on the job — from zero-day and Kerberoasting down to the everyday delivery vocabulary of push, commit, sync and deploy, down to the GPU, VRAM and quantisation underneath it all. Built for quick lookups, not long reading, and divided by term and by domain.

542 terms across 13 domains:

Domain	Terms
Networking & Protocols	39
Cryptography	38
Identity & Access	38
Attacks & Exploitation	38
Malware & Threat Actors	38
Application Security	40
Cloud & Infrastructure	38
Endpoints & Systems	38
Defense & Operations	38
Governance, Risk & Compliance	40
AI & Emerging Tech	38
Dev & Delivery	65
Compute & Hardware	54

Every definition is one or two sentences of plain English, written to answer the question you actually had when you looked the term up.

2. The Library

The feeling of walking into a library — except instead of books you find open data sources, open-source technologies and the communities behind them, ready to wire into a project. Browse the shelves, pull a spine, and you get what it is, how to reach the API, and what it costs.

105 sources across 11 shelves: Satellite & Earth Observation · Maps & Geospatial · Climate & Weather · Population & Development · Conflict, Rights & Humanitarian · Environment & Biodiversity · Health · Economy, Trade & Corporate · Security & Threat Data · Geospatial Tooling · Communities & Programmes.

Each entry records:

• What it is — what the dataset or tool actually gives you
• How to connect — the specific API, client library, or download route, including whether you need a key and what the gotchas are
• Access — free, free tier, non-commercial, or paid

3. The printed edition

The same collection set as a book: the dictionary in two justified columns running A to Z, the library as catalogue cards walked shelf by shelf. Read as book in the header opens a page-turning reader over it, and the PDF is at book/cyber-dictionary.pdf.

The pages are typeset from terms.js and library.js — the same two files the search box reads — so the printed and searchable editions cannot drift apart in wording. The typesetting itself lives in the CoLab website repo at src/app/print/cyber-dictionary/, which pulls this repo's data with scripts/sync-cyber-dictionary.mjs and prints the PDF with npm run render:books cyber-dictionary. After a substantial round of new entries, re-run those two there and copy the result back into book/.

The reader is read-as-book and its page-flip dependency, both vendored under vendor/ rather than pulled from a CDN so the site stays buildless and needs no network beyond its own origin.

Editing

No build step, no dependencies, no framework. Three files do the work:

• terms.js — the dictionary. {t: term, a: abbreviation, d: domain, def: definition}
• library.js — the library. {n: name, o: organisation, u: url, s: shelf, w: what it is, h: how to connect, c: cost}
• index.html — the whole interface, inline

Add an entry by appending an object to the relevant array. To add a domain or shelf, add it to window.DOMAINS / window.SHELVES first — entries whose category is not listed there will not render.

Open index.html in a browser to check your change. It works from file:// — the data is loaded as plain scripts rather than fetched, precisely so it does. The one exception is the book reader, which is an ES module: it needs the page served over HTTP, so use the server command below if you are testing that.

git clone https://github.com/Ethical-Tech-CoLab/cyber-dictionary.git
cd cyber-dictionary
open index.html          # or: python3 -m http.server 8000

Deployment

GitHub Pages, serving main at the repository root. Pushing to main publishes.

Contributing

Corrections and additions are welcome by pull request. Two rules:

1. Define it plainly. If a definition needs another definition to make sense, rewrite it. Say what the term means and, where it earns its place, why it matters in practice.
2. Library entries must be verifiable. Link the real project, and describe the access route specifically enough that someone could follow it — name the API, the client library, the key requirement.

Credits

Built and maintained by Ethical Tech CoLab.

The idea for a plain-language cyber dictionary came from a shared artifact by a colleague of the CoLab; this repository is an independent implementation, written from scratch, with the library section added as a second half.

Licence

Prose — definitions and source notes — is released under CC BY 4.0. Code is released under the MIT licence (see LICENSE).

Every project in the library carries its own licence. Check it before you ship.