Terminology – AMX MVP-5100 User Manual
Page 165
Appendix B: Wireless Technology
157
MVP-5100/5150 Modero Viewpoint Touch Panels
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 WAPs 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:
- 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
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.