SUSAN@YALEVM.BITNET (Susan Bramhall) (06/30/89)
Please excuse me if you receive multiple copies of this note. I am sending it
to several lists which may have a subscriber who has relevant information.
We are interested in providing an encrypting gateway for our campus network.
The idea is that users on certain LANs considered secure wish to send data
across an unsecured ethernet spine and eventually into another secure LAN or
host. We have several ideas for the gateway (based on previous software
developed at Yale) but would like to acquire a software or, preferably
hardware, encryptor. Ideally, it would be a card with the ability to
encrypt/decrypt on its own chip rather than taking up workstation CPU cycles.
We would pass it data and a key and it would return encrypted data. The
gateway is being built on an IBM PS/2. Any leads would be very much
appreciated.
I also wonder if other sites are thinking about this problem and, if so, what
sort of solution are you looking at? All of the security discussions which I
have seen are concerned with authorization and access control (such as dial
back) rather than encryption of data. Does anyone know of a forum where this
has been discussed? Note, by the way, that we are not planning to do any
research into encryption algorithms, a subject I am happy to leave to the
mathematicians.
Since I do not subscribe to ANY of the lists, please send replies directly to
me (as well as the list if you like). Thanks for in advance for your help.
Susan Bramhall
Senior Research Programmer