Patent ID: 7818563
Filing Date: 2010-10-19
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A network interface system for interfacing a host system with a network to provide outgoing data from the host system to the network and to provide incoming data from the network to the host system, the network interface system comprising: a bus interface system adapted to be coupled with a host bus in the host system and transfer data between the network interface system and the host system; a media access control system adapted to be coupled with the network and to transfer data between the network interface system and the network; a memory system coupled with the bus interface system and the media access control system, the memory system being adapted to store frames of the incoming and outgoing data; and a security system coupled with the memory system, the security system being adapted to selectively perform security processing on the frames; wherein the security system comprises, for receive or transmit processing respectively, one or more encryption pipelines adapted to perform one or more encryption or decryption algorithms and two sets of one or more authentication pipelines adapted to perform one or more authentication algorithms; wherein the security system is configured to selectively process frames through the encryption pipelines and the two sets of authentication pipelines and the security system toggles whereby each frame is selectively processed by the encryption pipelines but successive frames alternate between the two sets of authentication pipelines, wherein the security system further comprises a parsing module adapted to identify mutable fields in the incoming or outgoing frames and a concatenating module, wherein the parsing module generates one mask bit for each byte of data in each frame and the concatenating module concatenates groups of the bytes together with their corresponding mask bits into a single register, and wherein the authentication pipelines authenticate the frames exclusive of the mutable fields identified by the mask bits.