Using a Chaotic Cipher to Encrypt Ethernet Traffic

In this work a new physical layer encryption method for Ethernet 1000Base-X standard is proposed. The proposed encryption scheme uses a chaotic stream cipher to encrypt the 8b10b symbols flow at PCS (Physical Coding Sublayer) level. The complete system has been implemented in an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Experimental results are analyzed, concluding that it is possible to cipher traffic at this level and hide the complete Ethernet traffic pattern from any malicious observer. Moreover, no overhead is introduced during encryption and no throughput losses are produced.

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