Glossary Z

Zero standing privileges (ZSP) is an access model where no user or system has permanently assigned elevated permissions — all privileged access is granted dynamically on demand and revoked automatically after the session ends. ZSP eliminates the risk of standing privileged credentials being stolen and abused for extended periods. It is implemented through just-in-time access solutions, PAM platforms, and cloud IAM temporary credential mechanisms.

A zero-day is a vulnerability that is unknown to the software vendor or the public and has no available patch. The name refers to the zero days of advance notice defenders have had to prepare. Zero-days are highly valuable in offensive security and are exploited by nation-state actors and sophisticated criminal groups before discovery. Detection of zero-day exploitation relies on behavioral anomaly detection rather than signature-based approaches.

Zero-shot learning refers to a language model's ability to perform a task correctly given only a natural language description of what to do, without any worked examples in the prompt. Large models exhibit strong zero-shot performance on diverse tasks due to broad pre-training and instruction tuning. Zero-shot prompting is the simplest form of in-context learning and enables rapid deployment to new tasks.

ZTA is a security model that eliminates implicit trust and requires continuous verification of every user, device, and network flow. Instead of perimeter-based security ("trust everything inside the firewall"), zero trust assumes breach and enforces least-privilege access, micro-segmentation, and continuous authentication for every resource request.

ZTNA provides secure remote access to applications based on identity and context rather than network location, replacing legacy VPN approaches. Users are granted access only to specific applications they are authorized for, not the entire network segment, dramatically reducing blast radius if credentials are compromised. ZTNA is a core component of SASE and zero trust architectures.