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Glossary

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A

Access control

The process of ensuring that content is accessed only by those entities authorised to do so, and only in a manner for which they have been authorised.

ADSL

Short for Asymmetrical DSL. See DSL. ADSL offers differing upload and download speeds and can be configured to deliver up to six megabits of data per second (6000K) from the network to the customer. See also VDSL and xDSL.

AES

Short for Advanced Encryption Standard. Cryptographic algorithm; NIST-approved standard. The current AES is Rijndael. It was chosen by NIST because it is considered to be both faster and smaller than its competitors. See also DES and 3DES.

Asymmetric encryption

Type of encryption in which encryption keys are different from decryption keys, and one key is computationally difficult to determine from the other. Uses an asymmetric algorithm.

Authentication

The process of proving the genuineness of an entity (such as a smart card) by means of a cryptographic procedure. Put simply, authentication amounts to using a fixed procedure to determine whether someone is actually the person he or she claims to be.

Authorisation

An authorisation gives access (or legal power) to some protected service. In a CA system, the authorisation gives access to encrypted services (channels, movies, etc).

Asymmetric algorithm

Same as public key algorithm. See also asymmetric encryption.

API

Short for Application Programming Interface.