摘要 |
Methods and an apparatus are provided for providing secure communications around a firewall. The firewall is configured to only pass packets if they originate on a more protected side of the firewall or if they are in response to such a packet. A persistent secure connection is made from a connection manager program inside the firewall to a server outside the firewall. A protocol request message is then sent from the connection manager to the server over the secure connection. Requests arriving from a client are embedded in a protocol response message and sent to the connection manager program. After processing, the results, if any, are sent as a protocol request message to the server, which extracts the result from the protocol request message and puts the result in a protocol response message, which is sent to the requesting client. |