Nomadix AG 2300, User Manual, Page: 293 / 294

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Glossary of Terms 281
Term Definition
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) A security protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs)
defined in the 802.11b standard. WEP is designed to provide the same level of security
as that of a wired LAN. LANs are inherently more secure than WLANs because LANs are
somewhat protected by the physicalities of their structure, having some or all of the
network inside a building that can be protected from unauthorized access. WLANs,
which are over radio waves, do not have the same physical structure and therefore are
more vulnerable to tampering. WEP aims to provide security by encrypting data over
radio waves so that it is protected as it is transmitted from one endpoint to another.
Wi-Fi™ (Wireless Fidelity) Used generically when referring of any type of 802.11 network,
whether 802.11b, 802.11a, dual- band, etc. The term is promulgated by the Wi-Fi
Alliance. Any products tested and approved as “Wi-Fi Certified” (a registered trademark)
by the Wi-Fi Alliance are certified as interoperable with each other, even if they are from
different manufacturers. A user with a “Wi-Fi Certified” product can use any brand of
access point with any other brand of client hardware that also is certified. Typically,
however, any Wi-Fi product using the same radio frequency (for example, 2.4GHz for
802.11b or 802.11g, or 5GHz for 802.11a) will work with any other product, even if that
product is not “Wi-Fi Certified.”
WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) Also referred to as LAWN. A type of local-area network
that uses high-frequency radio waves rather than wires to communicate between
nodes. See also, Node.
WMI (Web Management Interface) The browser-based system administrators interface for all
Nomadix Gateways.
WPA (Wi-Fi™ Protected Access) A Wi-Fi™ standard that was designed to improve upon the
security features of WEP. The technology is designed to work with existing Wi-Fi
products that have been enabled with WEP (as a software upgrade to existing
hardware), but the technology includes two improvements over WEP:
Improved data encryption through the temporal key integrity protocol (TKIP). TKIP
scrambles the keys using a hashing algorithm and, by adding an integrity-checking
feature, ensures that the keys haven’t been tampered with.
User authentication, which is generally missing in WEP, through the extensible
authentication protocol (EAP). WEP regulates access to a wireless network based on a
computer’s hardware-specific MAC address, which is relatively simple to be “sniffed out”
and stolen. EAP is built on a more secure public-key encryption system to ensure that
only authorized network users can access the network.
It should be noted that WPA is an interim standard that will be replaced with the IEEE’s
802.11i standard upon its completion.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) A specification developed by the W3C. XML is a pared
down version of SGML, designed especially for Web documents. It enables designers to
create their own customized tags to provide functionality not available with HTML. For
example, XML supports links that point to multiple documents, as opposed to HTML
links, which can reference just one destination each. For all Nomadix Gateways, XML is
used by the subscriber management module for port location and user administration.
Enabling the XML interface allows your Nomadix Gateway to accept and process XML
commands from an external source. XML commands are appended to a URL in the form
of an encoded query string. Nomadix Gateways parse the query string, executes the
commands specified by the string, and return data to the system that initiated the
command request. See also, HTML, TCP, and W3C.