System Level Design of a Secure Healthcare Smart Card System

Smart card-based healthcare system has several advantages over conventional paper-based systems in terms of security, privacy and portablity. In this study, a secure health care smart card system was designed and simulated. The goal of the project is to design a smart card system which will meet the major requirements of a healthcare identity system. Main features of the proposed system are data storage and secure data transfer. The system is a heterogeneous system with hardware and software components and it was designed using electronic system-level design methodology (ESL) with a top-down approach. It consists of cryptographic primitives, a central processing unit and memory blocks. RSA and AES are used for key share and encryption, respectively. An LFSR is employed to generate pseudo-random numbers which are used for calculating keys. We have used Aldec Active-HDL Student Edition to develop the system and perform mixed-language simulations. We have functionally verified the system using Active-HDL.