My first Cardis presentation led to a few discussions about possible paths for the exploitation of smart cards, or for challenges to be considered. Here is a selection of the most interesting discussions.
TPM. Somebody asked the question about the relationship of TPM and smart card. The latest TPM specifications give the impression that they are exending their scope in order to embrace the role of generic cryptographic token for a PC platform, possibly in replacement to smart cards. This of course may be true, as every technology tries to gain ground on the others. However, there also are goof arguments that go agaisnt this view. First, a TPM is tied to a machine rather than a person, and this makes it quite difficult to be a representative of a person like a smart card can be. Then, and most importantly, the TPM is a device that is here to guarantee the integrity of a system, whereas the smart card is an identity device. This means that the basic mechanisms that are implemented are fundamentally different. They may be combined, of course, but there is no real reason behind that.
Smart card, storage, and locality. The idea of linking smart cards to storage isn’t new, and we have again talked about it, in particular with the possibility to link a smart card to storage, for instance through a secure MicroSD card. There are advantages to that, but allso drawbacks, as linking two elements reduces the flexibility for the buyer, who is then faced with fewer options. In a similar/opposed question, somebody pointed out the opposition between the perceived “locality” advantage of smart cards and the fact that everything is now available in the cloud. I believe that these discussions are heavily linked, and are also linked to the way in which we see storage.
Today, many people consider that their main storage is on their PC, with a possible backup in the cloud. We may in a while get to a situation where we consider that our main storage is in the cloud, and that the local storage on our PC and other devices simply is a local mirror of that main storage. What we need to understand is that this doesn’t mean that local storage is useless. For instance, we are far from being able to get the appropriate bandwidth to stream a HD video form anywhere, and it will take a while before we get there. Overall, this means that we will keep having local storage for a long time.
Internet of Things. Some people are seeing an interest for smart cards in the Internet of Things, for at least two reasons. The first one is the one that I have been defending for a while: a smart card, in particular one including the latest Java Card and GlobalPlatform technologies, is an incredibly optimized and secure platform, that can be used in a wide variety of ways, in particular as the heart of a small connected device. The second one is that many people in the Internet of Things community don’t focus much on the security aspects of their fields, that smart cards could bring. The main question is here to understand whether there is indeed no compelling reason to secure a network of sensors, or this is just a question of timing, which means that security issues will come up as soon as the main functional/practical issues will be addressed.
My feeling is of course that the second option is the right one; in that case, delaying the security considerations may once again be a big mistake, because a smart card core could of course bring the required security, but it could also do more than that, by providing an application framework and application management capabilities. Of course, if the smart card is only added later, it will only be considered as a security token.
This is of course yet another demonstration of the “ghetto effect” through which smart cards are solely considered for their security features, and never for anything else, although their computing power is often comparable to that of other chips.
Virtualized smart cards. The last discussion was about virtualized smart cards, a topic that I completely overlooked in my presentation. One of the views of a virtual smart cards is to consider several virtual smart cards within a given smart card. This could be interesting, for instance in the context of NFC, as a way to manage a card with several providers. We could even imagine to host several virtual cards with different configurations on a single hardware SE. Another view of virtualized smart cards, which is a bit more science-fiction, is to consider that we could have virtual smart cards in the cloud, with many cards hosted on some faraway secure device. I have no clue what that would lead to, but it sounds like an interesting thing to investigate.
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