On the road to Bandol

The e-Smart conference is coming soon, bringing once again the entire community to my home base in Sophia Antipolis. The program is now available, but we can only see titles and authors. A few things caught my eyes

• On Wednesday afternoon, there is a speech by Christophe Tremlet from STMicro entitled Designing Smartcard ICs that withstand Fault Injection Attacks. Sounds interesting. Too bad I may miss it, because I will be talking in AmI.d at the same time.
• On Thursday morning, the security session on attacks and countermeasures and the Java session run in parallel. Not good.
• In the afternoon, the speech by Infineon’s Wolfgang Pockrandt (Securing «State of the Art» Security Evaluations – Pooling Experience and Expertise Provides Confidence) sounds interesting (for an evaluator).
• The rest of that afternoon session seems geared toward CC people.
• In the same afternoon, the Mobile Telecom track seems interesting, in particular for those interested in the security of mobile devices.
• After that, the plenary session could be interesting, especially because it is moderated by Bertrand Ducastel, who has left our industry, and could be even more free-speaking than usual.
• On the final day, there is a choice between another Mobile Telecom session, focusing this time on SIM cards with big flash memory (whose tone seems pretty much marketing-driven), and a session about operating systems and methodology (which sounds a bit more technical).
• In that session, I have noticed in particular the speech by Benoît Gonzalvo (Gemalto), which could be about future Java Card security.

Now, here is a more detailed look at the speeches from the Java Card sessions:

• The first talk, by RATP’s François Guillaume, will be an eye-opener for all people who think that Java Card is deadly slow.
• Don’t miss the talk by Thierry Violleau and Tanjore Ravishankar from Sun if you want to get some basic information about the next release of Java Card.
• Damien Sauveron (from Limoges University) should be refreshing with its particular use of smart cards.
• I will follow closely the talk by the Nijmegen guys about non-atomic methods, because the behavior of these method definitely is an open issue in Java Card 2.x.
• The talk from Infineon about application-specific cache also seems interesting, because cache performance is quite important for Java Card.
• The second session, after Christian Goire’s introduction, starts with Pascal Urien (ENST), who will tell us of its recent advances about the use of smart cards for securing WLANs.
• The next one is quite enigmatic (Tearing Java Cards), but Erik Poll’s team usually does interesting things.
• The final talk, Customized and Low-Footprint Java Card Systems Through Romization and Late Specialization, will necessarily be interesting and forward-looking (although not necessarily of immediate application), because it involves Gilles Grimaud and Jean-Jacques Vandewalle.

There should also be three “mystery talks” about Java Card, from the contestants to the Java Card Forum’s prize, but I am not sure what they are and when they will take place.

Overall, this looks like a rather good show.