An Approach for Recovering Satellites and their Cryptographic Capabilities in the Presence of SEUs and Attacks

Abstract

Abstract

An efficient fault-tolerance technique for the Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code

“…Security architectures have been recently proposed in [13], [15], [16] to authenticate communications between ground stations and spacecrafts and to provide security services to data processed on-board. Specifically, they rely on hash functions for integrity checking, block encryption for achieving confidentiality, and on trusted modules for cryptographic keys recovery.…”

“…In addition to providing secure communications, HMAC and SHS can be employed in invasion detection and recovery schemes [13], as well as on the upgrade of the spacecraft computation platform. By using those schemes, it becomes possible, for example, to determine whether an attacker, who may have broken into the satellite, has tampered with the system configuration, and issue an order the secure reconfiguration of its subsystems.…”

Efficient fault tolerant SHA-2 hash functions for space applications

“…All of those works make use of cryptographic primitives such as hash functions to achieve their goals, but none of them considers the harsh environment surrounding spacecrafts and more specifically the resistance to SEUs. In [7] only, a security scheme for key recovery in satellites is proposed with SEU-resistant hardware. The authors, however, employ existing techniques for fault tolerance like TMR and HC, but do not specifically investigate new approaches for fault tolerance.…”

“…These cryptographic primitives allow for the integrity checking of data received from a ground station to assure that they were not accidentally or maliciously compromised. Furthermore, it could also be employed in invasion detection and recovery schemes [7]. By using those schemes, it becomes possible, for example, to determine whether an attacker, who may have broken into the satellite, has tampered with the system's program memories or FPGA configuration.…”

“…Security architectures [7], [8] have been recently proposed to authenticate communications between ground stations and spacecrafts or to provide security services to data processed on-board. To do so, cryptographic primitives are utilized, such as hash functions for integrity checking/authentication and block encryption for confidentiality.…”