Terminology; 176; Aes; Certificates (Ca) - AMX MVP-9000i Operation And Reference Manual

Appendix B: Wireless Technology

Terminology

802.1x
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.

AES

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.

CERTIFICATES (CA)

A certificate can have many forms, but at the most basic level, a certificate is an identity combined with a public key, 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:
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Typical certificate information can include the following items:
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MIC

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.

TKIP

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.

WEP

Short for Wired Equivalent Privacy, WEP is a scheme used to secure wireless networks (WiFi). 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scheme, WEP was superseded by WiFi Protected Access (WPA), and then by the full IEEE 802.11i standard (also known
as WPA2).

WPA

WiFi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) is a class of system used to secure wireless (WiFi) 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 wireless
access points.
To resolve problems with WEP, the WiFi Alliance released WPA (FIG. 128), 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.

176

PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail)
DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules)
PKCS12 (Public Key Cryptography Standard #12)
Certificate Issue Date
Extensions
Issuer
Public Key
Serial Number
Signature Algorithm
User
Version
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