Lloyds Cryptographic Subsystem


Client:          Lloyds Bank, London
Project:        Cryptographic Security Subsystem
Dates:           Mar 90 / July 90

 

 Team Leader

Multi-Threaded I/O Design

TAL programming

Worked for 5 months on-site at Logica’s office in Boston, America as a designer and team leader  on a project producing a message/transaction switch to be used by Lloyds Bank of London.  This  switch was based on  Logica’s Transaction Director (LTD) product, running on Tandem VLX hardware.

Was responsible for leading the team which performed the low level design and implementation of a “Security Subsystem” (SS) which handled message authentication, encryption, decryption etc. for the switch.  This SS provided a central point for the supply of security services, to be used by multiple applications within a large electronic banking system.

The applications were shielded as much as possible from the details of the cryptographic processing, and were relieved of the need to physically manipulate cryptographic data and hardware. The sub-system operated as a simple Tandem requester-server relationship in Pathway environment; An high level API  allowed uses to pass commands to the system and low level drivers scheduled requests to the physical hardware. The split architecture allowed for a variety of hardware devices to be used, if necessary, all driven by the same user level requests. These cryptographic services were based on Logica’s Modular Security Architecture (LMSA).

Personally performed the detailed design, coding (TAL) and unit testing of the low level multi-threaded device driver process which managed the physical security devices (Racal RGL6000). Developed memory, queue and timer management facilities to handle the asynchronous read/write interface with the security devices, using Tandem’s Generalized Full Duplex Protocol (GFDX) as the communications level protocol.

This project was part of Lloyd’s larger Electronic Banking System (EBS) development

 

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