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Reference Manual for the 54 Mbps Wireless Router WGR614 v4
Glossary
3
December 2003
A Certificate Authority is a trusted third-party organization or company that issues digital certificates used
to create digital signatures and public-private key pairs.
The role of the CA in this process is to guarantee that the individual granted the unique certificate is, in fact,
who he or she claims to be. Usually, this means that the CA has an arrangement with a financial institution,
such as a credit card company, which provides it with information to confirm an individual's claimed
identity. CAs are a critical component in data security and electronic
commerce because they guarantee that
the two parties exchanging information are really who they claim to be.
CRL
Certificate Revocation List. Each Certificate Authority (CA) maintains a revoked certificates list.
Denial of Service attack
DoS. A hacker attack designed to prevent your computer or network from operating or communicating.
DHCP
An Ethernet protocol specifying how a centralized DHCP server can assign network configuration
information to multiple DHCP clients. The assigned information includes IP addresses, DNS addresses, and
gateway (router) addresses.
DMZ
A Demilitarized Zone is used by a company that wants to host its own Internet services without sacrificing
unauthorized access to its private network.
The DMZ sits between the Internet and an internal network's line of defense, usually some combination of
firewalls and bastion hosts. Typically, the DMZ contains devices accessible to Internet traffic, such as web
(HTTP) servers, FTP servers, SMTP (e-mail) servers and DNS servers.
DNS
Short for Domain Name System (or Service), an Internet service that translates domain names into IP
addresses.
Because domain names are alphabetic, they're easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on
IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the
corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com might translate to
198.105.232.4. The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server doesn't know how to
translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned.
Domain Name
A descriptive name for an address or group of addresses on the Internet. Domain names are of the form of a
registered entity name plus one of a number of predefined top level suffixes such as .com, .edu, .uk, etc. For
example, in the address mail.NETGEAR.com, mail is a server name and NETGEAR.com is the domain.
DoS
A hacker attack designed to prevent your computer or network from operating or communicating.