A cryptographic primitive based authentication scheme for run-time software of embedded systems

Ensuring integrity of run time software of the safety and safety related embedded systems used for protection, control and monitoring of nuclear power plants is an important issue. In this paper, we discuss the scheme being implemented on the in-house developed CPU board, to check integrity of run time software using cryptographic primitive. Our scheme uses off-line SHA-l (Secure Hash Algorithm) software implementation running on CPU of the in-house board and a hardware implementation of the same algorithm on a dedicated FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array) of the same board. This paper discusses the details of the design, issues with respect to the device resources and performance parameters.