Patent ID: 7990976

Claim:
A method for secure fast table lookups performed on a first one of a pair of network elements, comprising: establishing a plurality of connections of a protocol, wherein establishing each connection includes exchanging locally selected identifiers between the first network element and a second one of the pair of network elements, wherein the following is performed for each connection establishment: allocating connection data in memory of the first network element, generating a local identifier that is a pointer to the allocated connection data, applying a mathematical transformation to the generated local identifier, including a value representing the generated local identifier and a result of the mathematical transformation of the generated local identifier in a first portion and a second portion of a connection establishment packet respectively, and transmitting the connection establishment packet to the second network element; and responsive to receiving a first data packet of that protocol from the second network element, performing the following: extracting data from the first portion and the second portion of the first data packet, applying the mathematical transformation to the data extracted from the first portion, determining that a result of the mathematical transformation of the data extracted from the first portion matches the data extracted from the second portion of the first data packet, and dereferencing the data extracted in the first portion to locate the allocated connection data for the first data packet.