Security Architecture for Multi-Applications Smart Cards

Abstract

The increasing power of smart cards has made their use feasible in applications such as electronic passports, military and public sector identification cards, and cell-phone based financial and entertainment applications. As the prime uses of smart cards are identification, authorization and encryption, it is crucial that sufficient trust be established between different applications executing on the same smart card.

This research focuses on developing and enhancing techniques for securing smart cards’ multi-applications operating system. Smart card hardware provides limited resources with respect to traditional computer; adding many challenges for developing and securing the operating system. It is required to minimize the code size, memory usage, and to increase the security, the performance and the development flexibility. The research proposes a novel method to analyze the bytecode of applets installed on the smart card. The resources limitations forces the usage of an on-demand methodology for dynamic analysis of the bytecode. The proposed method is verified against security and performance requirements and is found to be efficient in both.

Keywords: Multi-applications smart card, Java Card, Bytecode Verification, Embedded Software Design, Software Security