GOLGE: a case study of a secure data communication subsystem for micro-satellites

This paper presents a real-time data encryption/decryption subsystem developed for a satellite, which is planned to be launched in 2007 by TUBITAK-BILTEN. The subsystem GOLGE contains two ASICs, which perform encryption/decryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) algorithms and a communication interface unit. The data/command interface of the GOLGE module is implemented on a reconfigurable ASIC (FPGA), where the encryption/decryption processors have previously been designed in TUBITAK-BILTEN and prototyped in ANTIS 0.35-μm CMOS technology. The system uses an 8-bit bidirectional data bus, which operates at a maximum frequency of 40 MHz supplying a throughput of 160 Mbit/sec and a SpaceWire interface, which provides a 100 Mbit/sec serial data communication link.