The research detailed in this document deal with the design and implementation of a hardware integrated circuit intended to be used as a cryptographic sub-system in secure software defined radios. Since the early 90's, radio systems have gradually evolved from traditional radio to software defined radio. Improvement of the software defined radio has enabled the integration of an increasing number of communication standards on a single radio device. The designer of a software defined radio faces many problems that can be summarized by the following question: How to implement a maximum of communication standards into a single radio device? Specifically, this work focuses on the implementation of cryptographic standards aimed to protect radio communications. Ideally, the solution to this problem is based exclusively on the use of digital processors. However, cryptographic algorithms usually require a large amount of computing power which makes their software implementation inefficient. Therefore, a secure software defined radio needs to incorporate dedicated hardware even if this usage is conflicting with the property of flexibility specific to software defined radios. Yet, in recent years, the improvement of FPGA circuits has changed the deal. Indeed, the latest FPGAs embed a number of logic gates which is sufficient to meet the needs of the complex digital functions used by software defined radios. The possibility offered by FPGAs to be reconfigured in their entirety (or even partially for the last of them) makes them ideal candidates for implementation of hardware components which have to be flexible and scalable over time. Following these observations, research was conducted within the Conception des Systèmes Numériques team of the IMS laboratory. These works led first to the publication of an architecture of cryptographic subsystem compliant with the security supplement of the Software Communication Architecture. Then, they continued with the design and implementation of a partially reconfigurable multi-core cryptoprocessor intended to be used in the latest FPGAs.
