Tech & Document Glossary
Clear, rigorous explanations of document standards, browser security protocols, cryptographic primitives, and web performance metrics.
Zero-Knowledge Focus
Deep dives into browser cryptography & memory isolation
WebAssembly & Performance
Demystifying WASM, Core Web Vitals, and binary codecs
Document Formats & Standards
ISO 19005 PDF/A, EXIF metadata, and ATS text parsing
Privacy & Security
10 TermsClient-Side Encryption
A cryptographic architecture where data is encrypted directly on the user's local device (browser or native app) before any transmission, ensuring third-party servers and cloud hosts never possess the unencrypted plaintext or decryption keys.
Zero-Knowledge Architecture
A system design methodology where the service provider has zero technical capability or cryptographic keys to view, parse, decrypt, or log customer data.
EXIF Metadata
Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) is a standard specification that formats image and sound files recorded by digital cameras and smartphones, storing hidden metadata such as GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamp, and shutter speed.
SHA-256 Cryptographic Hash
A member of the Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2) family designed by the NSA, which takes an input of any size and produces a unique, fixed-size 256-bit (32-byte, 64-character hexadecimal) one-way cryptographic fingerprint.
Content Security Policy
An HTTP response header and HTML security standard that restricts which domains scripts, styles, fonts, and network requests can load from, mitigating Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and data exfiltration.
Symmetric vs. Asymmetric Encryption
The core dichotomy in cryptography comparing single shared-secret algorithms (AES-GCM, ChaCha20) against public/private key-pair algorithms (RSA, ECC, X25519).
Cross-Site Scripting
A web security vulnerability allowing adversaries to inject malicious client-side executable scripts into trusted web pages viewed by other users.
Timing Attack
A side-channel attack where an adversary measures microsecond variations in computation or comparison execution time to infer secret cryptographic keys, passwords, or authentication tokens.
Subresource Integrity
A W3C security specification enabling web browsers to verify that remote resources (scripts and stylesheets) fetched from third-party CDNs have not been maliciously modified by validating base64 cryptographic hashes.
Canvas Fingerprinting
A browser tracking technique exploiting subtle hardware, GPU, sub-pixel rasterization, and font anti-aliasing variations when rendering to an HTML5 <canvas> to uniquely identify devices across websites without cookies.
Web Architecture
3 TermsWebAssembly
A binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine, designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and Go, enabling near-native execution speeds inside modern web browsers.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
A browser security mechanism that uses HTTP headers to tell web browsers whether a web application running at one origin has permission to access resources from a server at a different origin.
Origin Private File System
A high-performance, origin-isolated private virtual file system provided by the browser File System Access API for fast, low-latency file I/O in Web Workers and WebAssembly.
Document Formats
3 TermsPDF/A (ISO 19005)
An ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for the digital preservation and long-term archiving of electronic documents, strictly prohibiting features that threaten future reproducibility like external font links, encryption, and JavaScript.
Optical Character Recognition
The computational conversion of scanned paper documents, photos, and raster images of text into machine-readable, searchable, and editable character strings.
DEFLATE Compression Algorithm
A lossless data compression standard combining the LZ77 sliding window dictionary algorithm with canonical Huffman entropy coding, powering ZIP, Gzip, PNG, and PDF FlateDecode streams.
Performance & Web Vitals
3 TermsCore Web Vitals
A set of specific standardized metrics created by Google that measure real-world user experience for web page loading speed (LCP), interactivity responsiveness (INP), and visual stability (CLS).
Lossless vs Lossy Compression
The fundamental dichotomy in data compression algorithms: Lossless compression reduces file size with zero mathematical data loss (allowing exact reconstruction), while Lossy compression discards imperceptible visual or audio frequencies to achieve dramatically smaller files.
Service Workers & Offline Caching
Background programmable network proxy scripts that intercept HTTP requests and cache web assets locally for instant, offline Progressive Web App (PWA) operation.
Experience Zero-Knowledge In Action
Test our client-side WebAssembly tools. Compress PDFs, convert HEIC images, or inspect SHA-256 hashes right in your browser with zero server uploads.