Design Of Portable Hard-Disk Encryption System Based On MEMS Strong-Link Controlled By FPGA

With the increasingly important role portable hard disk played in the field of data storage, people paid more and more attention to the information security. The main trend and means to protect the data security is hard disk data encryption. Although encryption by software can work conveniently, its application is limited to the simple decryption and too much system resource cost. Hardware encryption, which is sure to be widely used, is not only independent on system resource, but also has the reliable methods of key management. In addition, the authentication features of traditional portable hard disk encryption system are not secure enough to prevent the illegal users reading data from the hard disk through the back door.As a high confidentiality device, MEMS strong-link can be used for the encryption system to provide authentication function and physical key generation. In this paper, the portable hard disk encryption system (PHES) based on MEMS strong-link is designed as a novel hardware encryption system, which will be widely used in the information security, military and other safety requirements field. PHES combined the data encryption with authentication in one, and used the physical key generated by its special mechanical structure to encrypt data on hard disk, making it very difficult to be cracked. Compared with software encryption, PHES greatly enhanced the system security without reducing system performance; while with hardware encryption, the unique access to physical key of PHES greatly increased the difficulty of cracking. In addition, PHES had advantages of stability, high transfer rate, and transparent encryption both to host and device.In this dissertation, the whole design and implementation of portable hard-disk encryption system are illustrated. According to the framework of PHES, the design of USB interface controller is introduced first, then the ATA protocol interface controller, including data transfer modes and frequently used commands. Meanwhile, it proposed the design frame of controller circuit for MEMS strong-link and implementation of AES algorithm. The whole circuit diagram of the system had been done to PCB board, and the first generation prototype of the PHES is accomplished. According to the result of testing, PHES achieved the transparent data encryption and authentication function, the transfer rate of read/write dataflow can reach 17MB/s in Ultra DMA mode 2.