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Hello all

Well then, considering that the IEEE refers to TKIP and CCMP as cipher suites, and that both acronyms includes the word "protocol" in them, confirming that they are in fact protocols, I guess we have to assume that in the context of wlans it refers to the same thing... although I am far from convinced that outside of this context, "protocol" and "cipher suite" are the same thing.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that while doing some practice tests for the CWNA tonight, I noticed that TKIP and CCMP was refered in one of the questions as "protocols".... along with SSH2... which is a protocol (not specific to wlans) ... but isn't a cipher suite.... SSH2 can use many different cipher suites in its implementation...

From all the reading I've been doing, this is the definitions I came with for those terms:

"Cipher" = encryption algorithm, digest (hash) algorithm, or any other algorithm used to encode data in any way.

"Cipher suite" = A set of algorithms (ciphers) selected and used by a protocol to encode data.

"Protocol" = A set of procedure/rules used in the implementation of the selected cipher suite.


Those are very simplified definitions obviously, but I think they are pretty much accurate, although I would appreciate if someone could confirm my view on this...


Marc