"Honest" is a nice word. Sadly, some people in this world are not honest. In an increasingly wired world, dishonest people have found myriad opportunities to illicitly acquire one's confidential data, to monitor or interfere with one's networking activities, e.g., to monitor what you are doing, downloading, accessing, etc., to eavesdrop on or hijack telephony control and voice data or other protocols on your network, etc. To address such risks, typically a secured communication protocol, e.g., TLS or SSL, is utilized to protect communication. Unfortunately, TLS, SSL, and many other security environments require the underlying communication protocol to be TCP/IP, while some protocols needing communication protection, such as VoIP, RTP, SNMP, etc. only operate on UDP and not TCP/IP. Thus, a network shim or other embodiments disclosed herein may be used to allow such UDP based application programs and protocols to use security environments requiring a TCP/IP type transport.