Hardware implementation of a secure bridge in Ethernet environments

Presents a solution providing secure communications over an extended Ethernet LAN. This solution, proposed by the Applied Mathematics and Telematics Department of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is based on a set of secure bridges, called cryptonets, and a supervision and administration center (SAC), which takes charge of the remote management of the work of these devices. A first version of the physical and functional architecture of these secure bridges was presented previously. The present authors describe a modification of the initial architecture, in order to improve substantially its performance, both the typical functions of a classical bridge (filtering frame speed) and the specific functions of ciphering. Furthermore, it allows one to build more integrated equipment, with a larger number of functions and at a lower cost