Design and Implementation of Public Key Infrastructure on Smart Card Operating System
Aditi Gupta · 2008
Smart cards are an ideal medium for use in secure applications. Such applications require mechanisms for cryptographic authentication, password based authentication, confidential data exchange, detection of data tampering and verification of origin integrity. Cryptographic techniques based on symmetric key algorithms and/or public key cryptography can be used to address these issues. In this thesis, we focus on development of public key infrastructure on smart cards. Public key cryptography provides easier key management since keys are assigned on per user basis as opposed to per communication pair basis as in the case of symmetric key cryptography. Further, the public key cryptography can be used to perform key exchange for symmetric key and then the symmetric key cryptography can be used to perform further cryptographic operations. Smart cards are secure devices since the keys are kept in it securely and only the operations using such keys are permitted to be performed. We propose a comprehensive design for development of public key infrastructure on smart cards. This design is compliant to ISO/IEC-7816 international standards for smart cards [2–9] and the SCOSTA-CL specification [1]. We have implemented features like encryption/decryption schemes, storage and retrieval of cryptographic information etc. on the smart card operating system as per our design specifications.