Abstract: A traffic management system sniffs data arriving at any point in a system. The sniffer operates to extract certain data from each address. This data could be, for example, the IP address data and the physical address data. The extracted data is then used to access different data bases to determine if matches occur. Time stamps, sequencing and other parameters of each piece of data entering a system are used to control data access.

Abstract: The present invention is directed to a system and method which essentially hides the protection device from the public network, while still allowing the device to perform security inspections. The system and method, in one embodiment, operates in the promiscuous mode and does not have a physical address that is identifiable to any internal or external device, and is thus not available for direct attacks. Using this approach, every data packet flowing into the protected system can be viewed and actions taken to protect the network while the device remains free of the threat of a direct attack.