HOTSPOT GATEWAY
342 Glossary of Terms
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.
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