Appendix F:Glossary 821
Nortel WLAN—Security Switch 2300 Series Configuration Guide
pseudorandom number generator See PRNG.
PSK Preshared key. The IEEE 802.11 term for a shared secret, also known as a shared key. See shared secret.
PTK Pairwise transient key. A value derived from a pairwise master key (PMK) and split into multiple
encryption keys and message integrity code (MIC) keys for use by a client and server as temporal session keys
for IEEE 802.11i robust security. See also 802.11i.
public key In cryptography, one of a pair of keys, one public and one private, that are created with the
same algorithm for encrypting and decrypting messages and digital signatures. The public key is made
publicly available for encryption and decryption. See also PKI; private key.
Public-Key Cryptography Standards See PKCS.
public-key infrastructure See PKI.
PVST+ Per-VLAN Spanning Tree protocol. A proprietary Cisco protocol that supports a separate instance
of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for each virtual LAN (VLAN) in a network and maps the multiple
spanning trees to a single tree, to comply with the IEEE 802.1Q specification. See also STP.
QoS Quality of service. A networking technology that seeks to measure, improve, and guarantee
transmission rates, error rates, and other performance characteristics, based on priorities, policies, and
reservation criteria arranged in advance. Some protocols allow packets or streams to include QoS
requirements.
quality of service See QoS.
RA See registration authority (RA).
radio profile A group of parameters, such as the beacon interval, fragmentation threshold, and security
policies, that you configure in common across a set of radios in one or more Access Point (AP). A few
parameters, such as the radio name and channel number, must be set separately for each radio.
RADIUS Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service. A client-server security protocol described in
RFC 2865 and RFC 2866. RADIUS extensions, including RADIUS support for the Extensible Authentication
Protocol (EAP), are described in RFC 2869. Originally developed by Livingston Enterprises, Inc., to
authenticate, authorize, and account for dial-up users, RADIUS has been widely extended to broadband and
enterprise networking. The RADIUS server stores user profiles, which include passwords and authorization
attributes.
RC4 A common encryption algorithm, designed by RSA Data Security, Inc., used by the Wired-Equivalent
Privacy (WEP) protocol and Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP).
received signal strength indication See RSSI.
registration authority (RA) Network software that verifies a user (client) request for a digital
certificate and instructs the certificate authority (CA) to issue the certificate. Registration authorities are part of
a public-key infrastructure (PKI), which enables secure exchanges of information over a network. The digital
certificate contains a public key for encrypting and decrypting messages and digital signatures.
Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service See RADIUS.