the communications adapter 334 is operable to receive data from the bus 312 and conform that data to a network protocol for transmission over the network 340 such a protocol may be tcp ip netbios or a variety of other networking protocols which are common within the art the communications adapter 334 has one or more addresses associated with it which it can use to u2018 sign u2019 outgoing packets or which it can use to determine if an incoming packet is intended for it the communications adapter 334 may use u2018 aliasing u2019 to simultaneously associate more than one address with that communications adapter 334 the data to be transmitted becomes the payload 216 previously discussed in reference to fig2 the communications adapter 334 may also be operable to receive data from the network 340 and repackage or route that data as the payload 216 of an encapsulated packet the operation of the present invention is demonstrated in fig4 an intranet structure 410 may have several vpn tunnel connections 412 414 each vpn tunnel connection 412 414 has associated with it an ip address 430 an encryption key 432 and an encryption method 434 as is well appreciated in the art the ip address 430 is a unique address within the internet 116 depicted in fig1 the encryption key 432 and the encryption method 434 can be any number.