The FREE Cybersecurity Glossary by Thor Pedersen!

Memory protection: A method used to prevent processes from accessing memory outside their own address space. This isolation mechanism prevents a faulty or malicious process from interfering with another process or the operating system, effectively protecting against unauthorized access or corruption of memory content and thereby maintaining system stability and security.

Memory scavenging: A technique used to identify and recover unused memory within a system. In terms of security, it's crucial that once memory blocks are freed or repurposed, any sensitive data previously stored is properly sanitized to prevent information exposure to subsequent processes, effectively mitigating the risk of data leakage or exploitation.

Mesh topology: A network setup where each node (a device like a computer or a router) is connected directly to several other nodes. It's a self-healing and robust way of structuring a network, as it provides multiple paths for data transmission, ensuring data can still be sent even if a particular path becomes unavailable.

Message Authentication Code (MAC): A short string of characters used to verify the integrity and authenticity of a message. It is generated by applying a cryptographic hash function to the message along with a secret key shared by the sender and receiver, ensuring the message's integrity and authenticity during transmission.

Message Digest: A short, fixed-length value that is generated from a longer message by a cryptographic hashing algorithm. It is used to verify the integrity of the message and to provide authentication. Examples of message digests include SHA-256 and MD5.

Message Digest 5 (MD5): A widely-used cryptographic hash function that produces a 128-bit (16-byte) hash value from input data. It's commonly used to verify data integrity. However, MD5 is considered to be broken and unsuitable for further use as it's vulnerable to hash collisions, where different inputs produce the same output hash.