Wireless by the numbers ... and letters

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP ): An encryption technique built into 802.11 wireless LANs using 40-bit keys.

802.1X: An authentication standard for LANs and WLANs, used to identify users before allowing their traffic onto the network.

Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA ): An industry standard based on a subset of an early draft of 802.11i. WPA replaces WEP's keying mechanism with a more robust system, called Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). WPA adds a strong message-integrity check and allows for authentication using 802.1X.

802.11i: In addition to all the features in WPA, 802.11i uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as a replacement for RC4 encryption.

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES ): AES is the U.S. government standard encryption protocol that replaces Data Encryption Standard.

Certificate authority: Independent organizations that verify the identities of internal or external network security servers, and give those servers the ability to do the same for clients that connect to them, using encrypted certificates that are verified by the server every time the client logs on.

Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP ): An extension of Point-to-Point Protocol that supports many authentication methods, including Kerberos, public-key authentication and smart cards. In the IEEE's 802.1X, EAP is encapsulated in LAN or WLAN traffic, providing the mechanism for verifying the identity of a user to a RADIUS or other authentication server.

Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol (LEAP): a proprietary version of EAP that Cisco developed.

Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP ): a proprietary, extended-function version of EAP that Microsoft, Cisco and RSA Security developed.

EAP-Transport Layer Security (EAP-TLS): another Microsoft-created proprietary extension, but this one has been accepted by the IETF as a public standard.

EAP-Tunneled Transport Layer Security (EAP-TTLS) , a proprietary protocol developed by Funk Software and Certicom; under consideration by IETF as a new standard.

Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP): an encryption protocol designed to provide more secure wireless encryption than WEP by making keys more difficult to crack. TKIP is the encryption mechanism for WPA, but is replaced by AES in 802.11i, which is also known as WPA2.