AMX MVP-8400i - page 178

Appendix B - Wireless Technology
164 MVP-8400i 8.4" Modero® ViewPoint® Touch Panel with Intercom
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, 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, is part of the IEEE 802.11i encryption standard for wireless LANs.
TKIP provides per-packet key mixing, message integrity check and re-keying mechanism, thus ensuring
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 (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 As a result of identified weaknesses in this scheme, WEP was superseded by Wi-Fi Protected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).
WPA
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
wireless access points.
To resolve problems with WEP, the Wi-Fi Alliance released WPA (FIG. 75) 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.
WPA2
Also know as IEEE 802.11i, is an amendment to the 802.11 standard specifying security mechanisms for
wireless networks. The 802.11i scheme makes use of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) block
cipher; WEP and WPA use the RC4 stream cipher.