ice n.
[coined by Usenetter Tom Maddox, popularized by William
Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for `Intrusion
Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's
novels, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to
immobilize or even literally kill the intruder). Hence,
`icebreaker': a program designed for cracking security on a
system.
Neither term is in serious use yet as of early 1999, but many
hackers find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a
denotation in the future. In the meantime, the speculative usage
could be confused with `ICE', an acronym for "in-circuit
emulator".
In ironic reference to the speculative usage, however, some
hackers and computer scientists formed ICE (International
Cryptographic Experiment) in 1994. ICE is a consortium to promote
uniform international access to strong cryptography.
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