Me know grammar one day

I was giving a talk on security assessment at the New York State Cyber Security Conference today and used my regular “don’t talk like an expert” slide that I first wrote about on February 25th in “Security in four simple words”.  The point of the slide is that security vendors do a disservice to the community when they use obfuscated and exclusionist industry lingo to describe commonsense concepts.  I propose four simple words that should be used instead: Identity, Privileges, Credentials and Validation.  I explain how the first three words are nouns and represent static concepts, while the fourth is a verb and represents an action that you have to do at every transaction.  I’ve used this slide for several public and private presentations now and it usually solicits a good discussion.

Today, an audience member came up to me (mercifully after the talk was over and the other post-presentations questioners had departed) and said, “Validation is a noun.”

Dammit!  Why wasn’t I informed?!

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