Date of Award

2009

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Engineering Science

Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Supervisor

Dr.Jin Jiang

Second Advisor

Dr. Arash Reyhani Masoleh

Abstract

Modern industrial systems are increasingly based on computer networks. Network- based control systems connect the devices at the field level of industrial environments together and to the devices at the upper levels for monitoring, configuration and management purposes. Contrary to traditional industrial networks which axe con­ sidered stand-alone and proprietary networks, modern industrial networks are highly connected systems which use open protocols and standards at different levels. This new structure of industrial systems has made them vulnerable to security attacks. Among various security needs of computer networks, data integrity protection is the major issue in industrial networks. Any unauthorized modification of information during transmission could result in significant damages in industrial environments.

In this thesis, the security needs of industrial environments are considered first. The need for security in industrial systems, challenges of security in these systems and security status of protocols used in industrial networks are presented. Furthermore, the hardware implementation of the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) which is used in security protocols for data integrity protection is the main focus of this thesis. A scheme has been proposed for the implementation of the SHA-1 and SHA-512 hash functions on FPGAs with fault detection capability. The proposed scheme is based on time redundancy and pipelining and is capable of detecting permanent as well as transient faults. The implementation results of the proposed scheme on Xilinx FPGAs show small area and timing overhead compared to the original implementation without fault detection. Moreover, the implementation of SHA-1 and SHA-512 on Wireless Sensor Boards has been presented taking into account their memory usage and execution time. There is an improvement in the execution time of the proposed implementation compared to the previous works.

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