Technology

Glossary of Terms

This glossary contains common terms used throughout the ProofSpace documentation set.

BLOB - Binary Large OBject.

Certificate authority (CA) - A trusted organization referred to as a certificate authority (CA) issues and manages digital certificates within the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Certificate revocation list (CRL) - If another party discovers the private key of a digital certificate, that digital certificate is added to a certificate revocation list (CRL) to indicate that the digital certificate is no longer secure.

Ciphertext - In cryptography, ciphertext is encrypted text.

CRL - Certificate Revocation List.

Cryptology and cryptography - Cryptology is the science of secret writing, and is used to transmit information from one party to another without allowing intermediaries to learn the information. Cryptography is the encoding of information from plaintext to ciphertext. Often, people use the term cryptography to include both cryptography and cryptanalysis.

Digital certificate - A digital certificate is a digitally signed public key, which is used to authenticate the identity of the individual or organization using it.

Digital signature - A digital signature is a piece of data encrypted with a private key. Anyone can
then use the public key to decrypt the data and confirm the source.

DTD - Document Type Definition.

Encryption and decryption - In cryptography, to encrypt is to use an algorithm or cipher to convert plaintext to ciphertext. To decrypt is to convert the ciphertext back to plaintext.

Cracking - Cracking refers to breaking the secret code or key used to encrypt data (cracking allows the intermediary who cracks the algorithm to learn the information by decrypting a piece of ciphertext).

Hacking - Hacking refers to breaking into a system either to steal something or to be disruptive. Stealing a key or some ciphertext would be hacking. Breaking the key and decrypting the ciphertext would be cracking.

HSM - Hardware Security Module

Indicia - Indicia refers to the graphical representation of the ProofMark certificate, which
contains the data in the graphical representation.

JDBC - Java Database Connectivity.

Key - In cryptography, many algorithms use a key as part of the input to an encryption algorithm, which varies the results of the algorithm and makes the ciphertext more difficult to decipher.

Message-digest - In cryptography, a message-digest is a one-way function that takes any amount of plaintext and produces a fixed-length ciphertext. This ciphertext is referred to as the message digest, digest, or hash.

NTP - Network Timing Protocol.

Plaintext - In cryptography, plaintext is ordinary text or data that has not been encrypted.

Public key infrastructure (PKI) - The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) allows widespread use of public key technology by providing an accepted standard of algorithms, CAs, RAs, and access to public keys.

RDIST - Remote software distribution system. RDIST is used to maintain identical copies of files over multiple hosts, preserving the owner, group, mode, and mtime of the files if possible. Programs that are currently executing can be updated.

RSYNC - A file transfer program for Unix systems that provides a very fast method for synchronizing remote files, by sending just the differences in the files across the link without requiring that both sets of files be present at the same end of the link.

Servlet - A servlet is a Java program running inside a web server. The servlet uses HTTP as the communication protocol between the web server and the servlet. The client sends an HTTP message to the webserver, which in turn sends an HTTP message to the servlet within the web server. The header of the URL indicates which servlet the message is for.

Symmetric and asymmetric encryption - Symmetric encryption uses a single key to both encrypt the plaintext and decrypt the ciphertext. Asymmetric encryption uses two separate keys, one to encrypt, and one to decrypt. These two keys have a mathematical relationship that allows what is encrypted with one key to be decrypted only with the other key. Public key cryptography uses asymmetric encryption, where one key is made public, and the other is kept private.

TTP - Trusted Third Party. A trusted third party provides independent verification of authenticity.

UML - Unified Modeling Language.

UTC - Universal coordinated time. This is a time standard for absolute time.

X.509 - An international standard for the format of digital certificates.

XML - Refers to the eXtended Markup Language standard, published by the Worldwide Web Consortium. XML is a markup language where the tags indicate the usage of the data, rather than the layout or format of the data. The data within an XML document can then be displayed in different ways, according to the needs of the user.