Patent ID: 7082531

Claim:
A method of determining enforcement security devices in a network topology, the method comprising the computer-implemented steps of: locating a plurality of adjacent nodes within a sequence of nodes, the plurality of adjacent nodes being between a source node and a destination node in the network topology, each node in the plurality of adjacent nodes having at least two adjacent nodes, including a previous node in the sequence and a next node in the sequence, wherein for each node in the plurality of adjacent nodes, the next node is different than the previous node; for each particular node in the sequence: determining if the particular node is the destination node, and if the particular node is the destination node, then identify each node in the sequence as being part of a path closure set for the source node and the destination node; determining if the particular node is a loop closure node, and if the particular node is a loop closure node, then determining if one or more nodes in the sequence that are part of a loop path defined by the loop closure node are already designated as being part of the path closure set, then designating each node in the loop path as part of the path closure set, else designating each node in the loop path as part of the path closure set if at least a designated node in the loop path is subsequently determined to be part of the path closure set; and identifying one or more enforcement security devices from nodes in the path closure set.