Evaluation of High Speed Communication Interfaces for Next Generation Secure Element

Abstract

Secure element is a microprocessor chip that provides a secure environment to store the data, execute the applications and communicate the data to external entities securely. As secure element provides a promising security feature, it is used in various domains like IOT, automobile and mobile phones. Nowadays, the size of the security key and size of the data to be processed are increasing whereas the processing time of the secure element is expected to reduce. As the data size increases, the time to communicate the data between secure element and host increases. Host and secure element are connected via SPI over ISO IEC 7816-4 (T1) communication interface. In this paper, we evaluate the throughput of SPI over ISO IEC 7816-4 (T1) interface which is widely used in smart card domains. Throughput of the interface is evaluated by examining the time spent at communication interface for varying data size. We focus on understanding the parameters that affect the throughput of the SPI over T1 interface.