Hardware Implementation of a Secure Bridge in Ethernet Environments

In this paper we present 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 in [1], [2], [3]. Here we will 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 us to build more integrated equipment, with larger number of functions and at a lower cost.