Development of an embedded system for networking applications

Nowadays, people in the world get in touch with about 100 embedded systems per day, that not only have the aim to realize specific functions but also are a way to introduce innovations. According to the World Trade Statistics, in 2009 the 98\% of all programmable devices were embedded, and if in 2010 there were about 16 billion of embedded systems, in 2020 it is estimated that this number will increase, astonishingly reaching 40 billion units. With this capillary spreading of devices, privacy and information are in constant danger: according to Cybercrime Report 2016, cyber-attacks grow of the 350\% every year. It is of the foremost importance, therefore, to secure communications through embedded systems, especially for companies (and in particular military companies). National defence agencies must deal with confidential information, thus they have to develop solid devices for security: clear data has to be encrypted prior to the transmission and decrypted after the reception, to ensure that every information that comes out into the external world is safe, with no possibilities to externally monitor the traffic network and to go back to the original clear information. In this work, we propose the design of a cipher IP board called ENA (Embedded Networked Appliance), aimed to ensure a complete security of IP traffic exchanged on strategic networks for military applications, in order to guarantee a safe exchange of information from one host to another. The device is intended to be installed both at the transmitter and the receiver side, to hide information during the transmission. The Encrypting IP box is available for both optical and copper-based wired Ethernet Interfaces. It is designed for real time applications; the device can be used for VoIP transmissions and for time-sensitive applications, for this reason the UDP protocol is used for transmission. The device is composed by two different parts: a carrier board, that contains components to provide power to the whole system, and the main module, which is a proprietary company board. The main focus of the study is the design of the specific carrier board, with proper interfaces, for the realization of the IP cipher, and the development of the microprocessor and microcontroller software to execute the different tasks (e.g. download of the FPGA bitfile into the Flash Memory, configuration of the FPGA and the microprocessor application for Ethernet frame manipulation and encryption). At the end of the design, the system is tested with an external traffic analyser to analyse the throughput, and the working conditions are specified. The minimum frame size that allows a correct encrypting of the information through Ethernet has been discovered to be 1280byte. Thanks to this work, it has been possible to highlight the limits of the microprocessor and, although with the current restrictions the ENA could not be suitable for being an enterprise product, it represents a good proof of concept of how deeply military companies have to deal with the topic of security and confidentiality.