Building Secure High Speed Extranets

. Extranets are a technology for creating logical views of geographically separate LANs by providing a transparent interconnection mechanism between them over a WAN. As LAN bandwidths are typically higher than those of a WAN, and LANs typically support stronger security features, it is essential that extranets can be constructed to be both secure and high of speed. The security of an extranet can be significantly reduced if the interconnection mechanism is not capable of providing comparable level of security to that of LANs being interconnected. Typically, high speed and security require trade offs, but in this paper a method shall be proposed for employing IP switching technology and a new public key cryptographic paradigm, digital signcryption, to construct extranets with both high speed and high levels of security. The main contribution is to provide a design for an integrated LAN interconnection device to perform IP switching, packet routing and firewall functionality for construc..