Terminology Index

Glossary

2953 terms

CIAM Identity Data Model

A CIAM identity data model separates the internal subject from login identifiers, contact methods, authenticators, external-provider bindings, profiles, organizations, consents, sessions, recovery, fraud cases, and lifecycle state.

CIAM Outcome Metrics

CIAM outcome metrics combine customer-journey success with security, privacy, resilience, and support effectiveness using defined populations, denominators, data health, and privacy treatment.

CIAM Platform Evaluation

CIAM platform evaluation tests required customer journeys, protocols, security, privacy, accessibility, localization, operations, scale, support, resilience, migration, contract, and exit behavior with representative evidence.

CIAM Platform Landscape

The range of available customer identity platforms and their differing strengths, from full-featured commercial suites to developer-focused services and open-source options. Understanding the landscape is the starting point for choosing or benchmarking a CIAM solution.

CIAM Privacy by Design

CIAM privacy by design defines the purpose, lawful authority, necessity, access, sharing, location, retention, deletion, protection, and customer consequence of identity data before collection.

CIAM Release and Migration

CIAM release and migration move subjects, identifiers, provider bindings, authenticators, sessions, consents, tenant memberships, recovery, and lifecycle state without takeover, duplication, or loss.

CIAM Resilience Testing

CIAM resilience testing exercises identity, region, storage, cache, key, DNS, messaging, fraud, challenge, federation, webhook, and support failure under legitimate and hostile load.

CIAM Scope and Identity Populations

CIAM scope and identity populations define the consumers, citizens, patients, customers, customer-organization members, and other external subjects governed by a service.

CIAM Session Management

CIAM session management converts authentication into a local session with defined subject, tenant, audience, scope, issue time, idle and absolute life, rotation, revocation, concurrency, and logout behavior.

CIAM Tenant Configuration Security

CIAM tenant configuration security protects realms, clients, redirects, domains, templates, hooks, connectors, keys, secrets, administrators, logs, and environments through least privilege and reviewed change.

CIAM Tenant and Subject Boundaries

CIAM tenant and subject boundaries separate a durable account identity from organization membership, application, environment, role, and resource authorization.

CIAM Threat Landscape

The specific threats facing customer identity systems, including credential stuffing, account takeover, fake-account creation, bot-driven abuse, and fraud. Because CIAM is internet-facing and serves untrusted users, it absorbs attacks that workforce IAM rarely sees.

CIAM Threat Model

A CIAM threat model covers account discovery, credential attacks, phishing, token and session theft, recovery and linking takeover, fake accounts, feature abuse, tenant escape, support abuse, privacy harm, supply chain, and denial of service.

CIAM Use Cases

The customer-facing scenarios a CIAM platform must support, such as self-service registration and login, social and passwordless sign-in, profile and consent management, and progressive profiling. They define what the system actually has to do.

CIDR

Classless Inter-Domain Routing notation that represents an IP prefix and length, such as 192.0.2.0/24, for addressing, routing, and policy scope.

CIDR Notation

A compact way to write an IP address range and its network size, such as 192.168.1.0/24, where the number after the slash says how many leading bits define the network. It replaced rigid address classes with flexible subnetting.

CIS Benchmark

A technology-specific secure-configuration recommendation published by the Center for Internet Security, applied according to version, profile, scope, testing, and organizational requirements.

CIS Benchmarks

Detailed, consensus-developed configuration guides from the Center for Internet Security that specify how to securely configure operating systems, applications, and devices. They turn 'harden this system' into concrete, checkable settings.

CIS Benchmarks Cloud

CIS configuration benchmarks tailored to cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP, specifying secure settings for cloud accounts and services. They give cloud teams a concrete, checkable baseline for hardening their environments.

CIS Control Categories

The way the CIS Controls group their safeguards into logical areas, such as asset and software inventory, data protection, access control, and incident response. The categories organize the controls into a coherent program rather than a flat list.

The CIS Controls bundle dozens of safeguards into a set of categories that each address a domain of defense, helping teams see the program's structure and find the controls relevant to a given concern. Understanding the categories makes the framework navigable and supports planning coverage across the breadth of security, complementing the prioritization that Implementation Groups provide.

Introduced in: Security Frameworks and Control Mapping

Examples

Locating data-protection safeguards within their CIS control category.
Using the categories to check coverage across asset, access, and response domains.
Organizing a roadmap around the control categories.

CIS Controls Structurerelates_to Implementation Groupsrelates_to CIS Controls Prioritization Logicrelates_to Control Baselinesrelates_to Framework Ecosystemrelates_to CIS Controls Prioritization Logicrelates_to CIS Controls Structurerelates_to Implementation Groupsrelates_to

CIS Controls

A prioritized set of security practices used to reduce common cyber risk.

CIS Controls Prioritization Logic

The reasoning behind the order of the CIS Controls, which front-loads the safeguards that block the most common and damaging attacks, so organizations get the biggest risk reduction first rather than trying to do everything at once.

CIS Controls Structure

The overall architecture of the CIS Controls: a prioritized set of controls, each broken into specific safeguards, organized into categories and tiered by Implementation Groups. The structure is what makes the framework both comprehensive and actionable.

CIS for Smaller Organizations

Applying the CIS Controls in a way that fits a small organization's limited resources, by focusing on the foundational Implementation Group that delivers the most essential protection without requiring a large security team.

CIS vs Other Frameworks

How the CIS Controls compare with frameworks like the NIST CSF or ISO 27001: CIS is a prioritized, prescriptive set of concrete safeguards, while others are broader and more flexible or certifiable. The comparison helps teams pick the right tool for their need.

CISA KEV Use

CISA KEV use treats catalog membership as evidence that a CVE has been exploited in the wild and as an important input to vulnerability prioritization.

CISA ZTMM Pillars

The CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model organizes progress across Identity, Devices, Networks, Applications and Workloads, and Data, plus Visibility and Analytics, Automation and Orchestration, and Governance.

CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model

CISA's Zero Trust Maturity Model Version 2.0 describes Traditional, Initial, Advanced, and Optimal progression across five zero-trust pillars and three cross-cutting capabilities.

CMD Detection

Detecting suspicious use of the Windows command shell (cmd.exe), such as commands spawned by unexpected parents or running reconnaissance and download activity, since attackers heavily abuse built-in command-line tools.

CNAME Record

A DNS record that makes one domain name an alias for another, so a lookup of the alias is redirected to the canonical name's records. It is commonly used to point a name at a service whose address may change.

CNAPP

A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform: an integrated product that combines posture management, workload protection, identity analysis, and other cloud security functions into one platform for unified visibility and protection across the cloud lifecycle.

CNAPP (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform)

A cloud-native application protection platform combines several cloud-security capabilities, commonly posture, workload, entitlement, data, code, and exposure analysis, into one integrated platform.