Nortel Networks 2300 manual WPA information element See WPA IE

Glossary 631

WLAN 2300 System Software™ (WSS Software™) The Nortel operating system, accessible through a command-line interface (CLI) or the WLAN Management Software tool suite, that enables Nortel WLAN 2300 System products to operate as a single system. WLAN 2300 System Software (WSS Software) performs authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) functions; manages WLAN—Security Switch (WSS) switches and Access Point (AP) access ports; and maintains the wireless LAN (WLAN) by means of such network structures as Mobility Domain™ groups, virtual LANs (VLANs), tunnels, spanning trees, and link aggregation.

WPA Wi-Fi Protected Access. The Wi-Fi Alliance’s version of the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) that also includes a message integrity code (MIC) known as Michael. Although WPA provides greater wireless security than the Wired-Equivalent Privacy protocol (WEP), WPA is not as secure as IEEE 802.11i, which includes both the RC4 encryption used in WEP and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, but is not yet ratified by IEEE. See also AES; RC4; TKIP.

WPA IE A set of extra fields in a wireless frame that contain Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) information for the access point or client. For example, a Access Point (AP) access point uses the WPA IE in a beacon frame to advertise the cipher suites and authentication methods that the AP access point supports for its encrypted SSID.

WPA information element See WPA IE.

WSS See Wireless Security Switch™ (WSS™).

X.500 A standard of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Telecommunications Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), for systematically collecting the names of people in an organization into an electronic directory that can be part of a global directory available to anyone in the world with Internet access.

X.509 An International Telecommunications Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Recommendation and the most widely used standard for defining digital certificates.

XML Extensible Markup Language. A simpler and easier-to-use subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), with unlimited, self-defining markup symbols (tags). Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the XML specification provides a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the Internet, intranets, and elsewhere. Designers can create their own customized tags to define, transmit, validate, and interpret data between applications and between organizations.

Nortel WLAN Security Switch 2300 Series Configuration Guide