UC San Diego

Secure and reliable communication is one of the most important issues in the public safety domain. For public safety and emergency response organizations such as the Police and Fire departments, reliability and security of their communications is fundamental and requires both authentication of users as well as encryption of voice and data communication. Project 25 (P25) public safety waveform is the waveform of choice for most public safety and emergency response organizations in Northern America and includes features to enhance reliability and security of communications. This thesis describes the design and implementation of an encryption framework for a P25 waveform in a Software Communication Architecture (SCA) environment on an open-source Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform. The design and implementation of the framework which starts with a high level modeling of its state machine using pseudocode, goes through a bit-true intermediate implementation and ends with the final cycle- true and bit-true platform-specific implementation is discussed. This thesis proposes an encryption framework that is feasible for implementing the P25 encryption specifications and can be rapidly prototyped in an SCA environment on a cheap off-the-shelf SDR platform involving multiple processors