Hardware pipelined architecture with reconfigurable key based on the AES algorithm and hamming code for the earth observation satellite application: Sentinel-2 satellite data case

•A Pipelined cryptosystem architecture.•A Reconfigurable key used in the proposed cryptosystem (128/192/256) bits.•A Combination of the AES algorithm and hamming code to achieve a high security level.•Security performances analysis (Sentinel-2 Satellite case). Earth Observation Satellite has facilitated the study of the earth’s environment and become powerful in various applications such as: Land temperature, Land use, urban monitoring, defense, etc. Additionally, the transmission of this image captured from the EOS to the earth must be confidential and secure against illegal access, and without data corruption. However, this task remains challenging due to the space radiation environment that could affect the satellite’s hardware, and lead to corrupted data. These issues motivate our study to provide an enhanced approach to securing the satellite and ground station link. In this paper, we propose a secure implementation-based radiation-hardened Virtex-4QV FPGA. The secure implementation utilizes a combined architecture between the AES algorithm and Hamming code to ensure security. The most significant advantage of the proposed implementation is the use of the three keys 128/192/256 bits with the pipelined architecture which leads to a high throughput and a high level of security. Based on several security criteria, the suggested cryptosystem findings demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in terms of security. Therefore, this proposed solution can be used and utilized in the EOS application.