Acronym Guide

New to the industry?

Brush up on the acronyms — from ASN to XML — most commonly used by the network engineers and internet technologists in our community.

Internet Community Organization Names

Abbr Meaning
AFRINIC African Network Information Centre
AGWG ARIN Government Working Group
APNIC Asia Pacific Network Information Centre
ARIN American Registry for Internet Numbers
ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency
ASO Address Supporting Organization
ASO AC ASO Address Council
CANTO Caribbean Association of National Telecommunication Organizations
CITEL Inter-American Telecommunication Commission
CTU Caribbean Telecommunications Union
IAB Internet Architecture Board
IANA Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
ICANN GAC ICANN Government Advisory Committee
IEPG Internet Engineering and Planning Group
IESG Internet Engineering Steering Group
IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
IGF Internet Governance Forum
ISOC Internet Society
ITAC Internet Technical Advisory Committee
ITU International Telecommunication Union
ITU-T ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector
LACNIC Latin American and Caribbean Internet Address Registry
NANOG North American Network Operators’ Group
NAv6TF North American IPv6 Task Force
NRO Number Resource Organization
NRO EC NRO Executive Council
NRO NC NRO Number Council
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
RIPE Réseaux IP Européens
RIPE NCC RIPE Network Coordination Centre
WCIT World Conference on International Telecommunications
WGIG Working Group on Internet Governance
WSIS World Summit on the Information Society
WTSA World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly
WTFP World Telecommunications Policy Forum

Technical Terms

Abbr Meaning
AS Autonomous System
ASN Autonomous System Number
BGP Border Gateway Protocol
CA Cryptographic Authentication
CIDR Classless Inter-Domain Routing
CPS Certification Practices Statement
CRISP Cross Registry Information Service Protocol
DNS Domain Name System
DNSSEC Domain Name System Security
ICMP Internet Control Message Protocol
IN-ADDR Inverse Addressing
IP Internet Protocol
IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4
IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6
IRIS Internet Registry Information Services
IRR Internet Routing Registry
IXP Internet Exchange Point
LAN Local Area Network
LSN Large-Scale NAT
NAT-PT Network Address Translation - Protocol Translation
NIC Network Information Center
NOC Network Operations Center
PA Provider Aggregatable
PGP Pretty Good Privacy
PI Provider Independent
ROA Route Origin Authorization
Reg-RWS Registration RESTful Web Service
REST Representational State Transfer
RPKI Resource Public Key Infrastructure
RPSL Routing Policy Specification Language
RWhois Referral WHOIS
SSL Secure Socket Layer
SWIP Shared WHOIS Project
TCP Transport Control Protocol
UDP User Datagram Protocol
ULA Unique Local Address
VLSM Variable Length Subnet Mask
WAN Wide Area Network
Whois-RWS Whois RESTful Web Service
XML Extensible Markup Language
6 to 4 IPv4 Tunnel for IPv6 Traffic