The Cyber Security Body Of Knowledge has released its second edition—the confusingly named CyBOK Version 1.1.0! If you’ve not heard of it it is a ginormous cyber security textbook released for free online by Bristol University and the NCSC tht covers all there is to know about cyber security. It’s written by academic experts from around the world and it isn’t half bad! You should check it out and yell at us if you end up using it.
It was also my first post-doc after I came back back to research post-PhD and a brief stint in industry doing Space Stuff (tm). I typeset the first edition (and that’s a story for the pub) and I spent my last post-doc days typesetting the second edition.
The second edition has a bunch of new stuff (network security got a major update; new knowledge areas on actually using crypto instead of just how crypto works and formal methods; and index—finally)… but the bit I really want to point out is it has a list of acronyms.
When I was doing the first edition authors and editors were meant to mark acronyms they used for inclusion in an appendix… but they didn’t and so I did it—but it didn’t get checked in time for the release. For the second editors were mostly better, and checked them, and I did the extras, and so each chapter includes a list of acronyms. A huge number of acronyms. About 40 pages of them. Unsure what a TLA means? Check CyBOK it is probably in there.
When doing the acronyms one problem came up… should you aim to be encyclopaedic… or should you trust the authors? If one author marked IT an acronym, but another didn’t should the other author’s chapter be linked to the second author’s definition (assuming they were the same…a lot of things have the acronym MAC in cyber security)? I ended up saying yes, and adding all of them (with a vim macro to find and add them). Consequently they really are encyclopaedic, and that’s cool.
Go check it out!
I’m free of it now, but I’m proud of what we did. It’s a cool (and free) resource.