CFB-AES-TURBO: Joint Encryption and Channel Coding for Secure Satellite Data Transmission

As the advanced satellite network can serve extremely diverse information data to different types of users, it is of a vital interest to achieve data security using encryption over satellite channels. However, because the avalanche effect makes encryption techniques vulnerable to bit errors in the wireless channel, a more powerful encryption technique is required. In this paper, we propose a novel method of joint encryption and channel coding, called CFB-AES-TURBO, by combining advanced encryption standard (AES) encryption and turbo coding. As we introduce turbo coding in the cipher feedback (CFB) mode with AES, our scheme can protect bits and also correct bit errors. We control system parameters of the encryption block size and the code rate, tailored to the channel state information (CSI). As a result, we can achieve processing time gains, security enhancement, and bit error rate (BER) performance improvement at the same time.