Speaker: Dirk Lessner
When: 3:00PM Friday 2nd September 2005
Venue: 78-420
Abstract:
It is widely recognized that security is a concern in the design of a wide range of embedded systems. But security for these systems is an open question and could prove a more difficult long-term problem than security does today for desktop and enterprise computing. The promise of universal connectivity for embedded systems creates increased possibilities for malicious users to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information.
All modern security protocols use private-key and public-key algorithms. This thesis investigates three important cryptography algorithms (RC4, AES, and RSA) and their relevance to networked embedded systems. Limitations in processing power, battery life, communication bandwidth, memory and costs constrain the applicability of existing cryptography standards for small embedded devices. A mismatch between wide arithmetic for security (32 bit word operations) and embedded data bus widths (often only 8 or 16 bits) combined with a lack of certain operations (e. g., multi precision arithmetic) highlight a gap in the domain of networked embedded systems security.
The aim of this thesis is to find feasible security solutions for networked embedded system applications. The above mentioned cryptography algorithms have been ported to three hardware platforms (Rabbit RCM3000, Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA with MicroBlaze softcore, and a Linux desktop machine) in order to simulate several real world scenarios. Three applications - bidirectional transmission with encryption and decryption for various payload length, unidirectional transmission with very short payload, and encrypted data streaming - were developed to meet the simulation requirements.
Biography:
Dirk Lessner is an MPhil student, submitting his thesis in late August 2005, before returning to Germany in early September, 2005. He has been a recipient of a DSTC scholarship top-up. This thesis summarises the key results from his thesis.
Contact: Professor Neil Bergmann