US 6,502,135 B1
Agile network protocol for secure communications with assured system availabilityGeneral
US 6,502,135 B1
Agile network protocol for secure communications with assured system availability
Tech Center:
2100 Computer Architecture and Software
Examiner:
Krisna Lim
Art Unit:
2153 Data Bases & File Management
Agent:
Inventors:
Edmund Colby Munger; Douglas Charles Schmidt; Robert Dunham Short; Victor Larson; Michael Williamson
Assignee:
Priority:
10/30/98
Filed:
02/15/00
Granted:
12/31/02
Expiration:
02/15/20
Abstract
A plurality of computer nodes communicate using seemingly random Internet Protocol source and destination addresses. Data packets matching criteria defined by a moving window of valid addresses are accepted for further processing, while those that do not meet the criteria are quickly rejected. Improvements to the basic design include (1) a load balancer that distributes packets across different transmission paths according to transmission path quality; (2) a DNS proxy server that transparently creates a virtual private network in response to a domain name inquiry; (3) a large-to-small link bandwidth management feature that prevents denial-of-service attacks at system chokepoints; (4) a traffic limiter that regulates incoming packets by limiting the rate at which a transmitter can be synchronized with a receiver; and (5) a signaling synchronizer that allows a large number of nodes to communicate with a central node by partitioning the communication function between two separate entities.