A resourceful symmetric cryptographic construct for securing miniature satellite communications

Abstract

Increased miniaturisation and subsequent cost reduction of contemporary celestial satellites (e.g. CubeSats) has motivated a growth in deployment of said satellites for commercial and research applications. To thwart unauthorised wireless communications with the miniature satellites in earth orbit, a symmetric cryptographic technique referred to as Authenticated-Encryption with Associated-Data (AEAD) can be employed to secure the wireless communications by providing both confidentiality and integrity security services to corresponding data links. This paper introduces a resourceful block cipher based AEAD construct that is named CypherSat. CypherSat is designed to operate in hostile environments (e.g. ionising radiation) in particular it mitigates operational malfunction induced by transient single-event upsets (SEU) and multiple-bit upsets (MBU). CypherSat is benchmarked in comparison with two relevant AEAD constructs, CCM and TinyAEAD. The results of the software simulation benchmark indicate that CypherSat depending on its configuration; exhibited better performance regarding data processing latency, data processing throughput and processing efficiency for practical communicated data frame lengths.