The following terms are used by secure tunneling when establishing communication with remote devices. For information about how secure tunneling works, see How secure tunneling works.
- Client access token (CAT)
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A pair of tokens generated by secure tunneling when a new tunnel is created. The CAT is used by the source and destination devices to connect to the secure tunneling service. The CAT can only be used once to connect to the tunnel. To reconnect to the tunnel, rotate the client access tokens using the RotateTunnelAccessToken API operation or the rotate-tunnel-access-token CLI command.
- Client token
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A unique value generated by the client that AWS IoT secure tunneling can use for all subsequent retry connections to the same tunnel. This field is optional. If the client token is not provided, then the client access token (CAT) can only be used once for the same tunnel. Subsequent connection attempts using the same CAT will be rejected. For more information about using client tokens, see the local proxy reference implementation in GitHub
. - Destination application
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The application that runs on the destination device. For example, the destination application can be an SSH daemon for establishing an SSH session using secure tunneling.
- Destination device
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The remote device you want to access.
- Device agent
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An IoT application that connects to the AWS IoT device gateway and listens for new tunnel notifications over MQTT. For more information, see IoT agent snippet.
- Local proxy
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A software proxy that runs on the source and destination devices and relays a data stream between secure tunneling and the device application. The local proxy can be run in source mode or destination mode. For more information, see Local proxy.
- Source device
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The device an operator uses to initiate a session to the destination device, usually a laptop or desktop computer.
- Tunnel
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A logical pathway through AWS IoT that enables bidirectional communication between a source device and destination device.