Patent ID: 8180053

Claim:
A secure communications system or network, comprising: a security policy source for defining a certain security policy for communications to be exchanged among ports of the system; a control bus coupled to the security policy source; two or more ports coupled to the control bus, wherein each port has a different fixed port address and any given port is permitted under the security policy to transmit information or data only to another port to which the address of the given port has been provided by the security policy source, and the security policy source is operative to provide the given port an address of another, if any, from which the given port is permitted under the security policy to receive information or data; a data bus coupled to the ports and constructed and arranged to communicate information or data among the ports as permitted by the security policy; a time slot generator constructed and arranged to output the fixed port address of each of the ports sequentially in a recurring manner; and a time slot bus coupled to the output of the time slot generator and to each of the ports, and wherein each port is configured so that: (a) only when a given port detects the presence of its fixed port address on the time slot bus, the port is operative to write desired outbound data onto the data bus during a corresponding time slot; and (b) only when the given port detects the presence of another port address on the time slot bus which other address corresponds to a port whose address has been provided to the given port by the security policy source, the given port is operative to read data from the data bus during a corresponding time slot.