User manual
Appendix A – Terminology 
276
Certificates  A digitally signed statement that contains information about an entity 
and the entity's public key, thus binding these two pieces of information 
together. A certificate is issued by a trusted organization (or entity) 
called a Certification Authority (CA) after the CA has verified that the 
entity is who it says it is. 
Certificate 
Authority 
A Certificate Authority is a trusted third party, which certifies public 
key's to truly belong to their claimed owners. It is a key part of any 
Public Key Infrastructure, since it allows users to trust that a given 
public key is the one they wish to use, either to send a private message 
to its owner or to verify the signature on a message sent by that owner. 
Certificate 
Revocation List 
A list of certificates that have been revoked by the CA before they 
expired. This may be necessary if the private key certificate has been 
compromised or if the holder of the certificate is to be denied the ability 
to establish a tunnel to the SG unit. 
Data Encryption 
Standard (DES) 
The Data Encryption Standard is a block cipher with 64-bit blocks and a 
56-bit key. 
Dead Peer 
Detection 
The method of detecting if the remote party has a stale set of keys and 
if the tunnel requires rekeying. To interoperate with the SG unit, it must 
conform to the draft draft-ietf-ipsec-dpd-00.txt 
DHCP  Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. A communications protocol that 
assigns IP addresses to computers when they are connected to the 
network. 
Diffie-Hellman 
Group or Oakley 
Group 
The groups used as the basis of Diffie-Hellman key exchange in the 
Oakley protocol, and in IKE. 
Diffie-Hellman 
Key Exchange 
A protocol that allows two parties without any initial shared secret to 
create one in a manner immune to eavesdropping. Once they have 
done this, they can communicate privately by using that shared secret 
as a key for a block cipher or as the basis for key exchange. 
Distinguished 
Name 
A list of attributes that defines the description of the certificate. These 
attributes include: country, state, locality, organization, organizational 
unit and common name. 
DNS  Domain Name System that allocates Internet domain names and 
translates them into IP addresses. A domain name is a meaningful and 
easy to remember name for an IP address. 
DUN  Dial Up Networking. 
Encapsulating 
Security Payload 
(ESP) 
Encapsulated Security Payload is the IPSec protocol which provides 
encryption and can also provide authentication service. 
Encryption  The technique for converting a readable message (plaintext) into 
apparently random material (ciphertext) which cannot be read if 
intercepted. The proper decryption key is required to read the 
message. 
Ethernet  A physical layer protocol based upon IEEE standards. 










