FlexCOS: An open smartcard platform for research and education

Abstract

The smartcard industry treats their know-how and products as confidential. Consequently it is difficult to do research on smartcards without NDAs. We present a platform meant to lower the barrier to entry for smartcard research. It is built with mostly free software on affordable hardware and is designed to provide access to every level of the system. This platform allows to do research without NDAs as well as a more practical approach to education, since it is reproducible with limited costs. Its main advantages are the ability to make changes to the operating system, debugging on the running platform, and the possibility to integrate new hardware components into the system. We achieve this by compromising on hardware security aspects and form factor, and focus on the software aspects instead. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.