Lion Cipher Lab
Measure and improve the readability of a pentest finding
- Penetration Testing / Red Team
- Intermediate
- ~35 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
A penetration test only reduces risk if someone reads the findings and fixes the problems, and the people who must act are often developers, system owners and managers, not security specialists. Finding write-ups are frequently written in a dense, passive style: 'It was identified that... consequently facilitating unauthorized retrieval...'. That style hides who did what, what the risk is, and what to change. NIST SP 800-115 stresses that assessment reports must be written for their audiences, and the US federal plain language guidelines describe practical techniques: short sentences, active…
What you'll learn
- why report readability affects remediation
- the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade formulas
- counting sentences, words and syllables in code
- rewriting a finding in plain language without losing facts
- testing your own measurement tool
- what readability scores cannot tell you
- plain-language habits for technical writing
Steps in this lab
- Two formulas, two measurements
- The finding and its rewrite
- Write the scorer
- Measure both versions, and the tool itself
- Use the score as a smoke alarm, not a target