Appears in the Proceedings of the Second USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce
Oakland, CA, November 1996.
Smart Cards in Hostile Environments
Howard Gobioff, Sean Smith, J. D. Tygar, Bennet Yee
hgobioff@cs.cmu.edu, sean@watson.ibm.com, tygar@cs.cmu.edu, bsy@cs.ucsd.edu
Abstract
One often hears the claim that smart cards are the solution to a number of
security problems, including those arising in point-of-sale systems. In this
paper, we character the minimal properties necessary for the secure smart card
point-of-sale transactions. Many proposed systems fail to provide these
properties: problems arise from failures to provide secure communications
channels between the user and the smart card while operating in a potentially
hostile environment (such as a point-of-sale application.) Moreover, we discuss
several types of modifications that can be made to give smart cards additional
input/output capacity with a user, and describe how this addition I/O can
address the hostile environment problem. We give a notation for describing the
effectiveness of smart cards under various environmental assumptions. We
discuss several security equivalences among different scenarios for
smart cards in hostile environments.
Click here for the full paper in
postscript