Ciphering of Telemetry over IP – Performances on UDP

Abstract

With the evolution of TM data to Packet Streaming and the need to secure its confidentiality, UDP-based ciphering seems to be a good solution. But most of the UDP protocols that cipher packets are not unidirectional and assume that two UDP connections exist to perform a mutual secret sharing or to authenticate each party. Hensoldt brings to the market a ciphering solution based on a single unidirectional link over UDP, where it is not possible to construct a mutual secret sharing as it is usual for IKEv2 protocol. Similarly, to the PGP protocol, the frames contain the necessary material to be authenticated and deciphered. The traffic flow is simply intercepted, ciphered and forwarded toward the desired interface. To obtain an efficient solution, we must consider different modes of operation for symmetric ciphers, and CBC, OFB, GCM are modes often used. Each one has some advantages and disadvantages. We propose to study the performances of these modes in terms of speed and resilience in a noisy channel.