Nonce Definition

In security engineering, a nonce is an arbitrary number used only once in a cryptographic communication. It is similar in spirit to a nonce word, hence the name. It is often a random or pseudo-random number issued in an authentication protocol to ensure that old communications cannot be reused in replay attacks. For instance, nonces are used in HTTP digest access authentication to calculate an MD5 digest of the password. The nonces are different each time the 401 authentication challenge response code is presented, thus making replay attacks virtually impossible.

Source: Cryptographic nonce – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce