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Terminology
Terminology - Wireless Technology
802.1x
AES
CERTIFICATES (CA) A certificate can have many forms, but at the most basic level, a certificate is an identity combined with a public key,
MIC
TKIP
WEP
WPA
MVP-5200i Modero® ViewPoint® Touch Panel with Intercom - Instruction Manual
IEEE 802.1x is an IEEE standard that is built on the Internet standard EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol).
802.1x is a standard for passing EAP messages over either a wired or wireless LAN. Additionally, 802.1x is also
responsible for communicating the method with which APs and wireless users can share and change encryption
keys. This continuous key change helps resolve any major security vulnerabilities native to WEP.
Short for Advanced Encryption Standard, is a cipher currently approved by the NSA to protect US
Government documents classified as Top Secret. The AES cipher is the first cipher protecting Top Secret
information available to the general public.
and then signed by a certification authority. The certificate authority (CA) is a trusted external third party which
"signs" or validates the certificate. When a certificate has been signed, it gains some cryptographic properties. AMX
supports the following security certificates within three different formats:
• PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail)
• DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules)
• PKCS12 (Public Key Cryptography Standard #12)
Typical certificate information can include the following items:
• Certificate Issue Date
• Extensions
• Issuer
• Public Key
• Serial Number
• Signature Algorithm
• User
• Version
Short for Message Integrity Check, this prevents forged packets from being sent. Through WEP, it was possible to
alter a packet whose content was known even if it had not been decrypted.
Short for Temporal Key Integration, this is part of the IEEE 802.11i encryption standard for wireless LANs. TKIP
provides a per-packet key mixing, message integrity check and re-keying mechanism, thus ensuring that every data
packet is sent with its own unique encryption key. Key mixing increases the complexity of decoding the keys by
giving the hacker much less data that has been encrypted using any one key.
Short for Wired Equivalent Privacy, WEP is a scheme used to secure wireless networks (Wi-Fi). A wireless network
broadcasts messages using radio which are particularly susceptible to hacker attacks. WEP was intended to provide
the confidentiality and security comparable to that of a traditional wired network. As a result of identified
weaknesses in this scheme, WEP was superseded by Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), and then by the full IEEE
802.11i standard (also known as WPA2).
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) is a class of system used to secure wireless (Wi-Fi) computer networks. It
was created in response to several serious weaknesses researchers had found in the previous WEP system. WPA
implements the majority of the IEEE 802.11i standard, and was intended as an intermediate measure to take the
place of WEP while 802.11i was prepared (WPA2). WPA is designed to work with all wireless network interface cards,
but not necessarily with first generation Access Points. To resolve problems with WEP, the Wi-Fi Alliance released
WPA (FIG. 89), which integrated 802.1x, TKIP and MIC. Within the WPA specifications, the RC4 cipher engine was
maintained from WEP. RC4 is widely used in SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to protect internet traffic.
Appendix B: Wireless Technology
135
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