The Internet is becoming a widely used medium for communications and electronic commerce. However, in the current state of the Internet, user applications need to be installed to ensure that these kinds of communications are kept confidential and private. The long term solution is to use IPv6, the new Internet Protocol, which incorporates authentication and encryption in the lower part of the network layers, but until then there are higher level protocol such as SSL and SSH, to name a few.; In this thesis, a general problem that can be used to "hack" into computer systems is outlined. This is usually a first step before packet sniffing is used to collect more passwords from other communications. The IPv6 authentication headers and encapsulating security payload are introduced as the long term solution to combat both of the above problems. Finally, two current protocols are described that can authenticate and encrypt packets during communications on the Internet in the TCP/IP protocol without the need of the security features in IP (versions 4 and 6).
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