# Introduction

With the growing amount of information that travels on your local area network (LAN), confidential information has become a target for intruders both inside and outside your company. These intruders may be employees, visitors to your company, or a hacker who breaks through your firewall.

Intel® Packet Protect helps protect Internet Protocol (IP) traffic as it travels between systems on your LAN. This protects confidential data from being retrieved by intruders.

# About Intel® Packet Protect

Intel Packet Protect is designed to protect the confidentiality and authenticity of IP traffic on your LAN.

Intel Packet Protect can assist you in creating a departmental solution for your security concerns.

Many data compromises are attempted from within a company firewall. Unless you protect information as it travels on the network, it can be received by unintended users.

For example, employees retrieving confidential designs from a Research & Development department server use Intel Packet Protect to encrypt the information while it travels on the LAN. Encryption protects the confidentiality of the information. Each employee's system can also verify the integrity of the information upon receipt.

## Intel Packet Protect Features

Intel Packet Protect enables you to:

- Protect confidentiality and authenticity of IP traffic on your LAN using Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), including Internet Key Exchange (IKE).
- Use Entrust Entelligence to manage certificates, encryption, digital signatures, and other security issues on behalf of the user.
- Offload security tasks to an Intel® PRO/100 S Management or Server Adapter to optimize network performance.

## Complete Your Security Solution

If you need to protect data stored on a system, use operating system features combined with Intel Packet Protect. Intel Packet Protect protects data traveling between systems, not while it's stored on a system. Use your operating system features or network infrastructure element to provide access control to certain areas of the systems on the network.

### Hardware Acceleration

Implementing an IPSec solution can increase processor utilization for systems that use the IPSec software. This is common when implementing any IPSec solution because of the intense computation required to encrypt, decrypt, and validate packets. However, there is a way to offload security tasks from the processor.

You can combine Intel Packet Protect with the use of an Intel PRO/100 S Management or Server Adapter to reduce processor utilization. This frees processor utilization for other tasks, while reducing the impact to network performance.

### Additional Information

Intel Packet Protect help can be found in the Help directory on the product CD-ROM.

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