Establishing Secure Ethernet LANs Using Intelligent Switching Hubs in Internet Environments

With increasing security threats in internet environments, we may therefore want to establish a secure mechanism for data transmissions on each network. This paper presents a mechanism for establishing secure switching local area networks (LANs) by using intelligent switching hubs. Then we can achieve secure internet environments by means of the proposed switching LANs and firewalls. The proposed intelligent switching hub can easily be implemented and it has a short delay time. Also the switching LAN structure proposed in this paper is constructed using a symmetric tree, where the leaves represent user stations, the internal nodes represent intelligent switching hubs, and the links between any pair of nodes (or any pair of node and station) represent fullduplex communication connections. By using the proposed intelligent switching hubs and the link encryption technique, such a switching LAN can prevent eavesdropping and unauthorized access by restricting data delivery and stopping unauthorized users from adding devices to the network to get data. Moreover, it can allow simultaneous communications to exist in different parts of the network, and can isolate certain user stations or subnetworks so that many data transmissions can be simultaneously and securely accomplished.