A World Wide Name, or WWN, is a 64-bit address used in fibre channel networks to uniquely identify each element in a Fibre Channel network.

Soft Zoning utilizes World Wide Names to assign security permissions.

The use of World Wide Names for security purposes is inherently insecure, because the World Wide Name of a device is a user-configurable parameter.

For example, to change the World Wide Name (WWN) of an Emulex HBA, the users simply needs to run the `elxcfg` command.