Security for the Internet Protocol.

Lack of widely available security is hindering the growth of the Internet, particularly for commercial users. Two security mechanisms have been designed for use with IPv4 and IPv6. They are an integral component of the IPv6 design but can also optionally work with IPv4. The fff St mechanism provides source host authentication and information integrity protection without confidentiality and should be exportable and widely deployable. The second mechanism protects the confidentiality of packet contents through the use of encryption. Both mechanisms are designed to be independent of any particular cryptographic algorithm so that new algorithms can be supported in the future without any change to the basic protocols.