Meeting Security Requirements in Software Defined Radios

By using secure partitioning, an operating system can take advantage of a processor’s MMU to act like multiple processors—alleviating the need for redundant hardware and excessive power consumption and cost in portable software defined radios.

By Brian Doherty, Green Hills Software

With traditional, non-reprogrammable radios, providing data security classifications—say, between red and black communications —requires segregation through discrete comms sub-systems. Typically, these radios are closed systems that offer protection to the waveforms and cryptographic algorithms they contain. Devices operating at different security levels are often physically separated from each other and use different processor systems to achieve security partitions.