US Patent 8230493 Allowing differential processing of encrypted tunnels

In one embodiment, a method can include: (i) receiving an outbound packet in a network device, where the outbound packet includes a packet header; (ii) modifying the outbound packet by adding a service identifier to a cleartext portion of the packet header; (iii) when the outbound packet represents an event boundary, adding an event delimiter to the packet header; and (iv) passing the outbound packet to an encryption process for packaging and transmitting across a tunnel.