1.1 Glossary

This document uses the following terms:

Active Directory: The Windows implementation of a general-purpose directory service, which uses LDAP as its primary access protocol. Active Directory stores information about a variety of objects in the network such as user accounts, computer accounts, groups, and all related credential information used by Kerberos [MS-KILE]. Active Directory is either deployed as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) or Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS), which are both described in [MS-ADOD]: Active Directory Protocols Overview.

Active Directory domain: A domain hosted on Active Directory. For more information, see [MS-ADTS].

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES): A block cipher that supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES). AES can be used to protect electronic data. The AES algorithm can be used to encrypt (encipher) and decrypt (decipher) information. Encryption converts data to an unintelligible form called ciphertext; decrypting the ciphertext converts the data back into its original form, called plaintext. AES is used in symmetric-key cryptography, meaning that the same key is used for the encryption and decryption operations. It is also a block cipher, meaning that it operates on fixed-size blocks of plaintext and ciphertext, and requires the size of the plaintext as well as the ciphertext to be an exact multiple of this block size. AES is also known as the Rijndael symmetric encryption algorithm [FIPS197].

authentication level: A numeric value indicating the level of authentication or message protection that remote procedure call (RPC) will apply to a specific message exchange. For more information, see [C706] section 13.1.2.1 and [MS-RPCE].

binary large object (BLOB): A collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a database.

certificate: A certificate is a collection of attributes and extensions that can be stored persistently. The set of attributes in a certificate can vary depending on the intended usage of the certificate. A certificate securely binds a public key to the entity that holds the corresponding private key. A certificate is commonly used for authentication and secure exchange of information on open networks, such as the Internet, extranets, and intranets. Certificates are digitally signed by the issuing certification authority (CA) and can be issued for a user, a computer, or a service. The most widely accepted format for certificates is defined by the ITU-T X.509 version 3 international standards. For more information about attributes and extensions, see [RFC3280] and [X509] sections 7 and 8.

ClientWrap subprotocol: The subset of the BackupKey Remote Protocol that is used by a client that is capable of performing local wrapping of secrets, as specified in sections 3.1.4.1.3 and 3.1.4.1.4.

Data Encryption Standard (DES): A specification for encryption of computer data that uses a 56-bit key developed by IBM and adopted by the U.S. government as a standard in 1976. For more information see [FIPS46-3].

Data Protection Application Program Interface (DPAPI): An application programming interface (API) for creating protected data BLOBs. For more information, see [MSDN-DPAPI].

domain controller (DC): (1) The service, running on a server, that implements Active Directory, or the server hosting this service. The service hosts the data store for objects and interoperates with other DCs to ensure that a local change to an object replicates correctly across all DCs. When Active Directory is operating as Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), the DC contains full NC replicas of the configuration naming context (config NC), schema naming context (schema NC), and one of the domain NCs in its forest. If the AD DS DC is a global catalog server (GC server), it contains partial NC replicas of the remaining domain NCs in its forest. For more information, see [MS-AUTHSOD] section 1.1.1.5.2 and [MS-ADTS]. When Active Directory is operating as Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS), several AD LDS DCs can run on one server. When Active Directory is operating as AD DS, only one AD DS DC can run on one server. However, several AD LDS DCs can coexist with one AD DS DC on one server. The AD LDS DC contains full NC replicas of the config NC and the schema NC in its forest. The domain controller is the server side of Authentication Protocol Domain Support [MS-APDS].

(2) A server that controls all access in a security domain.

encryption: In cryptography, the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge.

endpoint: A network-specific address of a remote procedure call (RPC) server process for remote procedure calls. The actual name and type of the endpoint depends on the RPC protocol sequence that is being used. For example, for RPC over TCP (RPC Protocol Sequence ncacn_ip_tcp), an endpoint might be TCP port 1025. For RPC over Server Message Block (RPC Protocol Sequence ncacn_np), an endpoint might be the name of a named pipe. For more information, see [C706].

Generic Security Services (GSS): An Internet standard, as described in [RFC2743], for providing security services to applications. It consists of an application programming interface (GSS-API) set, as well as standards that describe the structure of the security data.

globally unique identifier (GUID): A term used interchangeably with universally unique identifier (UUID) in Microsoft protocol technical documents (TDs). Interchanging the usage of these terms does not imply or require a specific algorithm or mechanism to generate the value. Specifically, the use of this term does not imply or require that the algorithms described in [RFC4122] or [C706] must be used for generating the GUID. See also universally unique identifier (UUID).

GUIDString: A GUID in the form of an ASCII or Unicode string, consisting of one group of 8 hexadecimal digits, followed by three groups of 4 hexadecimal digits each, followed by one group of 12 hexadecimal digits. It is the standard representation of a GUID, as described in [RFC4122] section 3. For example, "6B29FC40-CA47-1067-B31D-00DD010662DA". Unlike a curly braced GUID string, a GUIDString is not enclosed in braces.

Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC): A mechanism for message authentication using cryptographic hash functions. HMAC can be used with any iterative cryptographic hash function (for example, MD5 and SHA-1) in combination with a secret shared key. The cryptographic strength of HMAC depends on the properties of the underlying hash function.

Interface Definition Language (IDL): The International Standards Organization (ISO) standard language for specifying the interface for remote procedure calls. For more information, see [C706] section 4.

Kerberos: An authentication system that enables two parties to exchange private information across an otherwise open network by assigning a unique key (called a ticket) to each user that logs on to the network and then embedding these tickets into messages sent by the users. For more information, see [MS-KILE].

little-endian: Multiple-byte values that are byte-ordered with the least significant byte stored in the memory location with the lowest address.

Network Data Representation (NDR): A specification that defines a mapping from Interface Definition Language (IDL) data types onto octet streams. NDR also refers to the runtime environment that implements the mapping facilities (for example, data provided to NDR). For more information, see [MS-RPCE] and [C706] section 14.

private key: One of a pair of keys used in public-key cryptography. The private key is kept secret and is used to decrypt data that has been encrypted with the corresponding public key. For an introduction to this concept, see [CRYPTO] section 1.8 and [IEEE1363] section 3.1.

public key: One of a pair of keys used in public-key cryptography. The public key is distributed freely and published as part of a digital certificate. For an introduction to this concept, see [CRYPTO] section 1.8 and [IEEE1363] section 3.1.

public key infrastructure (PKI): The laws, policies, standards, and software that regulate or manipulate certificates and public and private keys. In practice, it is a system of digital certificates, certificate authorities (CAs), and other registration authorities that verify and authenticate the validity of each party involved in an electronic transaction. For more information, see [X509] section 6.

public-private key pair: The association of a public key and its corresponding private key when used in cryptography. Also referred to simply as a "key pair". For an introduction to public-private key pairs, see [IEEE1363] section 3.

RC4: A variable key-length symmetric encryption algorithm. For more information, see [SCHNEIER] section 17.1.

remote procedure call (RPC): A communication protocol used primarily between client and server. The term has three definitions that are often used interchangeably: a runtime environment providing for communication facilities between computers (the RPC runtime); a set of request-and-response message exchanges between computers (the RPC exchange); and the single message from an RPC exchange (the RPC message).  For more information, see [C706].

Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA): A system for public key cryptography. RSA is specified in [RFC8017].

RPC protocol sequence: A character string that represents a valid combination of a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol, a network layer protocol, and a transport layer protocol, as described in [C706] and [MS-RPCE].

RPC transfer syntax: A method for encoding messages defined in an Interface Definition Language (IDL) file. Remote procedure call (RPC) can support different encoding methods or transfer syntaxes. For more information, see [C706].

RPC transport: The underlying network services used by the remote procedure call (RPC) runtime for communications between network nodes. For more information, see [C706] section 2.

security identifier (SID): An identifier for security principals that is used to identify an account or a group. Conceptually, the SID is composed of an account authority portion (typically a domain) and a smaller integer representing an identity relative to the account authority, termed the relative identifier (RID). The SID format is specified in [MS-DTYP] section 2.4.2; a string representation of SIDs is specified in [MS-DTYP] section 2.4.2 and [MS-AZOD] section 1.1.1.2.

security provider: A pluggable security module that is specified by the protocol layer above the remote procedure call (RPC) layer, and will cause the RPC layer to use this module to secure messages in a communication session with the server. The security provider is sometimes referred to as an authentication service. For more information, see [C706] and [MS-RPCE].

Server Message Block (SMB): A protocol that is used to request file and print services from server systems over a network. The SMB protocol extends the CIFS protocol with additional security, file, and disk management support. For more information, see [CIFS] and [MS-SMB].

ServerWrap subprotocol: The subset of the BackupKey Remote Protocol that is used by a client that does not perform local wrapping of secrets, as specified in sections 3.1.4.1.1 and 3.1.4.1.2.

SHA-1: An algorithm that generates a 160-bit hash value from an arbitrary amount of input data, as described in [RFC3174]. SHA-1 is used with the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) in the Digital Signature Standard (DSS), in addition to other algorithms and standards.

SHA-1 hash: A hashing algorithm as specified in [FIPS180-2] that was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA).

Simple and Protected GSS-API Negotiation Mechanism (SPNEGO): An authentication mechanism that allows Generic Security Services (GSS) peers to determine whether their credentials support a common set of GSS-API security mechanisms, to negotiate different options within a given security mechanism or different options from several security mechanisms, to select a service, and to establish a security context among themselves using that service. SPNEGO is specified in [RFC4178].

symmetric encryption: An encryption method that uses the same cryptographic key to encrypt and decrypt a given message.

symmetric key: A secret key used with a cryptographic symmetric algorithm. The key needs to be known to all communicating parties. For an introduction to this concept, see [CRYPTO] section 1.5.

Triple Data Encryption Standard: A block cipher that is formed from the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher by using it three times.

universally unique identifier (UUID): A 128-bit value. UUIDs can be used for multiple purposes, from tagging objects with an extremely short lifetime, to reliably identifying very persistent objects in cross-process communication such as client and server interfaces, manager entry-point vectors, and RPC objects. UUIDs are highly likely to be unique. UUIDs are also known as globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) and these terms are used interchangeably in the Microsoft protocol technical documents (TDs). Interchanging the usage of these terms does not imply or require a specific algorithm or mechanism to generate the UUID. Specifically, the use of this term does not imply or require that the algorithms described in [RFC4122] or [C706] must be used for generating the UUID.

unwrapping: Relating to a secret wrapped by this protocol: the decryption of a previously wrapped opaque BLOB to produce the original secret.

well-known endpoint: A preassigned, network-specific, stable address for a particular client/server instance. For more information, see [C706].

wrapping: Relating to a secret wrapped by this protocol: encrypting a secret to produce an opaque BLOB that can then be stored in normal, unprotected media. Wrapped secrets are often backed up to storage that is not specially protected.

MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.