Oracle HTTP Server, Administrator'S Manual

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Glossary-2
A certificate contains the entity’s name, identifying information, and public key. It is
also likely to contain a serial number, expiration date, and information about the
rights, uses, and privileges associated with the certificate. Finally, it contains
information about the certificate authority that issued it.
certificate authority
A trusted third party that certifies that other entities—users, databases,
administrators, clients, servers—are who they say they are. When it certifies a user,
the certificate authority first seeks verification that the user is not on the certificate
revocation list (CRL), then verifies the user’s identity and grants a certificate,
signing it with the certificate authority’s private
key . The certificate authority has its
own certificate and public key which it publishes. Servers and clients use these to
verify signatures the certificate authority has made. A certificate authority might be
an external company that offers certificate services, or an internal organization such
as a corporate MIS department.
CGI
Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is the industry-standard technique for
transferring information between a Web server and any program designed to accept
and return data that conforms to the CGI specifications.
ciphertext
Data that has been encrypted. Cipher text is unreadable until it has been converted
to plain text (decrypted) with a key. See
decryption .
cipher suite
A set of authentication, encryption, and data integrity algorithms used for
exchanging messages between network nodes. During an SSL handshake, for
example, the two nodes negotiate to see which cipher suite they will use when
transmitting messages back and forth.
cleartext
See plaintext .
cryptography
The art of protecting information by transforming it (encrypting) into an unreadable
format. See
encryption
.
DAD
See database access descriptor .