An effective symmetric key recovery scheme for secure onboard satellite applications

Reconfigurable FPGAs promise high density, performance and good schedulable options with their wide range of SRAM target devices that can be hosted for any applications. The SRAM FPGAs are widely used due to their vast resources and ease to design, but critically suffers due to radiation errors called single event upsets (SEU). These errors are prominent when the FPGA device is employed beyond an altitude. Therefore, it is very essential to prevent or to correct the SEUs, particularly for applications in satellites. The corruption of a cryptographic key by a SEU is considered to be a serious issue, because a single bit change in the key may damage the entire block of data and lead to severe increase in retransmission rates. The cryptographic keys are protected from SEUs by introducing an extra key recovery module (KRM). The proposed design is tailored for implementing a s ecured key for a Tiny Encryption algorithm (TEA) module resistant to SEU based on the stringent constraints of power, energy and cost. This paper proposes the FPGA implementation of TEA algorithm in hardware for onboard satellite applications.