A secure software-defined radio chip
AssigneeNagravision Sarl
InventorJoël M. CONUS
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The present invention relates to a software-defined radio chip or module suitable for integration on a host device. The software-defined radio chip comprises digital signal processing capability which includes standard digital signal processing hardware and reconfigurable programmable logic, the reconfigurable programmable logic is configured in such a way as to provide secure digital signal processing capability to the software-defined radio, thereby providing a secure software-defined radio.
Claims16
A software-defined radio chip comprising:
- a digital front end for converting digital intermediate frequency samples to digital baseband samples;
- and
- a digital back end for processing the digital baseband samples to provide a consumable content;
- the software-defined radio chip further comprising a reconfigurable hardware programmable logic circuit configured at least to function as the digital front end;
- characterised in that the reconfigurable hardware programmable logic circuit comprises a secure cryptographic device for providing a root of trust having a particular key as part of a key ladder scheme.
The software-defined radio chip according to any of the preceding claims, further comprising an analogue front end at least for converting a radio frequency signal to an analogue intermediate frequency signal and for converting the analogue intermediate frequency signal to provide the digital intermediate frequency samples.
The software-defined radio chip according to any of the preceding claims, wherein the secure cryptographic device comprises:
- a configuration module comprising:
- a decrypt and verify module for decrypting and authenticating and/or verifying the integrity of configuration data;
- and a processing module for processing at least a portion of the configuration data;
- at least one cryptographic module accessible via at least one input/output module;
- and
- an interconnection network passing between modules of the secure cryptographic device;
- wherein the configuration module is arranged to configure at least one of the input/output module or cryptographic modules and/or at least a subset of the interconnect network.
A method for programming a software-defined radio chip comprising a reconfigurable hardware programmable logic circuit, the software-defined radio chip comprising a root of trust, the method comprising:
- loading information onto the reconfigurable hardware programmable logic circuit after authenticating and decrypting the information using a key as part of a key ladder derived from particular key of the root of trust.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.