Digital microwave radio system and method with encryption

• US 9,059,866 B2
• Filed: 07/09/2007
• Issued: 06/16/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 12/30/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: REMEC Broadband Wireless Networks LLC (Moseley Associates, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Remec Broadband Wireless Holdings Incorporated (Moseley Associates, Inc.)
• Inventors: Bar-Sade, Idan, Pasternak, Eliezer, Zhang, Bin
• Primary Examiner(s): Pham, Luu
• Assistant Examiner(s): TURCHEN, JAMES R
• Application Number:
  US11/825,879
• Publication Number:
  US 20080267314A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,899 Days
• Field of Search: 380/37, 380/270
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H03M 13/15 Cyclic codes, i.e. cyclic shifts of codewords produce other codewords, e.g. codes defined by a generator polynomial, Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem [BCH] codes H03M13/17 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: H03M 13/1515 Reed-Solomon codes
• CPC Class Codes: H03M 13/2707 Simple row-column interleaver, i.e. pure block interleaving
• CPC Class Codes: H04K 1/00 Secret communication
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 1/0041 Arrangements at the transmitter end
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 1/0056 Systems characterized by the type of code used H04L1/08 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/46 Interconnection of networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 12/4604 LAN interconnection over a backbone network, e.g. Internet, Frame Relay
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2209/34 Encoding or coding, e.g. Huffman coding or error correction
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2209/80 Wireless network architectures or network communication protocols for wireless network security H04W12/00
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/0428 wherein the data content is protected, e.g. by encrypting or encapsulating the payload
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/166 at the transport layer
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/0637 Modes of operation, e.g. cipher block chaining [CBC], electronic codebook [ECB] or Galois/counter mode [GCM]
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 12/02 Protecting privacy or anonymity, e.g. protecting personally identifiable information [PII]
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 12/033 of the user plane, e.g. user's traffic

Abstract

A communications system are provided that provides integrated encryption capabilities. In particular, a digital microwave system, terminal and method are provided in which the encryption functions are integrated into the digital microwave terminals. The digital microwave system may also be implemented with external encryption units.

Claims

1. A secure digital microwave radio terminal, comprising:

at least one Ethernet interface;

a payload mapper that extracts one or more bytes from the data on the Ethernet interface including an inter-frame gap, having a first byte and a last byte that are Ethernet control words and at least one other byte with random bits, fragments the inter-frame gap into one or more blocks of data, and receives and inserts into the one or more blocks of data, data from a pseudo random sequence generator in response to a determination that there is no inter-frame gap to fragment into the one or more blocks of data;

at least one cipher unit that encrypts each block of data into a ciphertext block of data; and

at least one forward error correction encoding unit that adds error-check overhead bits to the ciphertext block of data before transmission over a microwave link.

2. The terminal of claim 1 further comprising at least two cipher units wherein the at least two cipher units operate in parallel to encrypt the one or more blocks of data.

3. The terminal of claim 1, wherein each cipher module uses an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption protocol.

4. The terminal of claim 1 further comprising an 8B/10B code converter that feeds 8B/10B-compliant data words into the forward error correction encoding unit.

5. The terminal of claim 4 further comprising an interleaver that inserts the 8B/10B-compliant data words between a portion of the error-check overhead bits.

6. The terminal of claim 4, wherein said 8B/10B compliant data words include Ethernet Control Words inserted for indicating a forward error correction frame boundary.

7. The terminal of claim 6, wherein one of the Ethernet Control Words is used to insert stuff-word-indicator words for the purpose of clock rate adaptation between said wireless link and said Ethernet Interface.

8. The terminal of claim 7, wherein said stuff-word-indicators are inserted at the payload transmit opportunity adjacent to a boundary of a Ciphertext block of data for synchronization.

9. The terminal of claim 1 further comprising at least two forward error correction decoding units operating in parallel.

10. The terminal of claim 1, wherein the cipher unit operates in a cipher block chaining mode.

11. The terminal of claim 1, wherein the cipher unit operates in an electronic code book mode.

12. The terminal of claim 10 further comprising a receive side that receives and decrypts the ciphertext block of data wherein the cipher unit has a decryption unit that uses an arbitrary initialization vector to descramble a first plaintext block of data from a descrambler.

13. The terminal of claim 1 further comprising an enclosure that houses the at least one Ethernet interface, the payload mapper, the at least one cipher unit and the at least one forward error correction encoding unit and a radio frequency unit.

14. The terminal of claim 1 further comprising an enclosure that houses the at least one Ethernet interface, the payload mapper, the at least one cipher unit and the at least one forward error correction encoding unit, and further comprising a radio frequency unit separate from the enclosure.

15. A process for securing a microwave link, comprising:

extracting an inter-frame gap, having a first byte and a last byte that are Ethernet control words and at least one other byte with random bits, from an interface carrying Ethernet traffic;

fragmenting the inter-frame gap into one or more blocks of data;

receiving and inserting into the one or more blocks of data, data from a pseudo random sequence generator in response to a determination that there is no inter-frame gap to fragment into the one or more blocks of data;

encrypting each block of data into a ciphertext block;

adding forward error corrected overhead words to generate an encrypted forward error corrected bitstream; and

transmitting the encrypted forward error corrected bitstream over a microwave link.

16. The process of claim 15, wherein the encrypting further comprises using an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

17. The Process of claim 16, wherein the encryption step further comprises using cipher block chaining mode.

18. The Process of claim 15, wherein the encryption step further comprises using electronic code book mode.

19. The Process of claim 15 further comprising converting the ciphertext block into 8B/10B code to generate 8B/10B-compliant words prior to the addition of the forward error corrected overhead words.

20. The Process of claim 19 further comprising interleaving at least some of the forward error corrected overhead words with the 8B/10B-compliant words to generate interleaved data prior to transmitting the interleaved data over the microwave link.

21. The Process of claim 20, wherein said 8B/10B compliant words include an Ethernet control word inserted for indicating forward error corrected overhead word frame boundaries.

22. The Process of claim 21, wherein one of said Ethernet Control Words is used for inserting stuff-word-indicator words for the purpose of clock rate adaptation between said microwave link and said Ethernet Interface.

23. The process of claim 22, wherein at least some of said stuff-word-indicators are inserted at the payload transmit opportunity adjacent to the boundary of a ciphertext block for synchronization.

24. The process of claim 15 further comprising receiving and decrypting a ciphertext block of data wherein the decryption uses an arbitrary initialization vector to recover a first plaintext block of data from the ciphertext block of data.