Vaibhav Bhandari
Department of Computer Science, UCSC
[email protected]
TOPIC: Security issues involved in plugging Smart Cards to portable computing platforms.
The portable computing platform is something more than PDAs (like PALM), its typical focussed to provide more computational power and run wide variety of applications for example Simputer[2] in India, VolksComputer in Brazil and MorphyOne [1] in Japan.
The security issues on the portables can be dealt as the Crypto support and System security.
Crypto Support: The security of portable is inherently tamperable due to the weak OS support[4]. Reasonable PKI support can be expected from efficient implemenation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography on these devices[5].
System security: The sensitive data on such devices can be kept on Smart Card for better security. Most of the smart card attacks are too cost prohibitive in a such a scenario[3]. More-over personalization and e-commerce can be made more accessible through this approach.
In this term project i will try to focus on the above issues on the portable platforms leading to a term paper and/or possible implementation.