Smart cards and Digital security

Abstract

Smart cards are portable tamper-resistant cryptographic devices that play a key role in digital security. This paper reviews the latest use of smart cards in securing network, online services, operating systems, and card-holder identity. Smart card network authentication is routinely used on GSM and 3G networks, and this paper shows how the same infrastructure can be extended to perform WiFi access point authentication. Securing online services with smart card is traditionally performed using public key cryptography and certificates, or using one-time-passwords. This paper presents new smart card authentication methods that either allow to reuse already issued cards or infrastructure, or provide stronger card-to-server mutual authentication. Finally, the paper will show how smart cards and trusted platform module have complementary roles for recuring the operating systems, and the use of smart cards in identity frameworks such as liberty alliance or Microsoft cardspace. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.