Smart Cards

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Smart Cards
Kelvin Hilton K213 k.c.hilton_at_staffs.ac.uk www.soc
.staffs.ac.uk/cmtkch
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Objectives

• Origins of Smart cards
• Types of card
• Formats
• Operating Systems

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Origins

• Pre 1950s cards were made of card
• Not very robust
• Easy to replicate
• First plastic card issued by Diners Club 1951
• Fraud not a huge problem because circulation was
  limited to certain sectors of society
• 27 outlets (mainly restaurants)
• 20,000 cardholders by end of first year
• 60000 dollar profit by year 2
• First cards were embossed with user details

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Origins

• 1958 arrival of Amex and VISA (Americard)
  accelerated demand
• 1968 Dethloff and Grötrupp patented idea of an
  integrated circuit on a card
• 1970 saw introduction of magnetic strip
• 1973 saw Worlds first ATM (New York)
• PIN Numbers were stored at terminal
• 1974 Moreno registered Smart Card patent
• Cost was too high for commercial application

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Origins

• 1984 French Postal and Telecommunications Service
  (PTT) conducted first field trials of telephone
  payment cards
• Ironic that this was not in the financial sector
• 1984 German telecommunications service ran
  comparison trials
• Optical cards (holographic)
• Magnetic strip
• Smart Card

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Origins

• 1994 EMV (Europay, Mastercard, VISA) issued Smart
  Card specification
• 1994 German health Smart Card issued (70 million)
• 1996 Zentrale Kreditausschuß (ZKA) issued
  specification for the Eurocheque Smart Card
• 1996 Austrian Government introduced Electronic
  Purse nationwide
• 1994 Special Mobile Group 9 (SMG9) issued first
  standard for the most successful Smart Card to
  date, the SIM card
• 2002 Chip and PIN introduced across Europe for
  Credit and Debit cards

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Types of Card
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Types of Card

• ISO/IEC manage worldwide standards
• ISO has 13 international working groups
• ISO 7810 covers ID-1 format
• ISO 781601 ff covers Smart Cards
• Define
• Location of components
• Tolerances
• Flexibility
• Temperature resistance
• Dimensions
• Legacy management

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Embossed

• ISO 7811
• Part 1 specifies character form, size, etc.
• Part 3 positioning

• Card ID includes issuer, country of origin, user
  ID, etc

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Magnetic Strip

• ISO 7811
• Part 2 specifies properties of magnetic strip.
• Up to 3 tracks
• 1 2 are read only
• 3 may be read write (eg last transaction data)
• Stores up to 1000 bits
• Usually, same data as that embossed on the card

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Magnetic Strip

• Standard data features of the ISO 7811 magnetic
  strip
• Life expectancy 1-2 years

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Smart Card

• ISO 7816
• Contain an embedded IC
• Can store, process and transmit data
• Orignally, 32k storage
• Now 64kB common
• 128kB just released
• Accessed via a serial interface controlled by
  cards OS
• Data can only be processed by on-chip processor

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Smart Card

• Life expectancy 10-15 years
• Two main groups
• Memory cards
• Microprocessor cards
• Can be contact or contactless (read using
  electromagnetic field)

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Memory Cards

• Data stored in Electrically Erasable Programmable
  Read-only memory (EEPROM)
• Access controlled by security logic
• Optimised for particular application
• Uses synchronous I/O protocol
• I2C bus is a commonly used standard for
  serial-access memory

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Microprocessor Cards

• Four functional blocks
• Mask ROM containing chip OS
• EEPROM program code data
• RAM volatile storage
• I/O usually single buffered register

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Contactless Cards

• Normal Smart Card has 8 contact points
• Risk of damage due to electrostatic discharge on
  contact
• Contactless cards have a built-in RF aerial

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Optical Memory Cards

• ISO/IEC 11 693/4
• At present write once only
• May be combined with Smart Card allows
  encryption, etc.
• Mostly used for medical data
• Very expensive both cards and read/write scanners
• Up to 4MB storage

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Application Requirements
Source Rankl Effing, 2000
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Formats
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ID-1

• Standard card size

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ID-000

• GSM SIM only

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ID-00

• New format

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ID-1/000 Combined

• Produced to save production costs

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Thermochromatic Cards

• A card with an embedded display has been
  developed though not commercially viable
• Thermochrome Displays use special material that
  allows visible data to be changed (reprinted)
• Thermal transfer printers heat individual points
  on the surface of the treated area
• Basically dot matrix, with 200 to 300 dpi
• Surface change occurs at 120oC
• If entire strip heated it becomes transparent
  (erasing)
• Very expensive
• Very easy to forge

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Card Materials

• Most common is PVC 85 (70000 tons used to make
  cards p.a)
• Very bad for the environment!!!!
• Other materials include PET, ABS, PC all are more
  expensive or have other disadvantages
• 1996/7 Danmøndt field trialed a card made out of
  bonded birchwood!

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Dominance of GSM

• Such is the worldwide dominance of GSM that the
  GSM 11.11 specification for Smart card
  microcontrollers is now the standard for all
• 8 bit CISC processor 1-5 MHz
• Motorola 6805
• Intel 8051
• 16 bit RISC processor
• Hitachi H8
• 16 bit memory address
• 32 bit CISC processors are under development
• 20MHz clock speed
• 40mA power consumption
• 5.9 mm2

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Operating Systems
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Smart Card OS

• STARCOS c1990 one of the first Smart card OSs
• Today over 1000 OSs
• CardOS Infineon
• Cyberflex Schlumberger
• MFC IBM
• PCOS Gemplus
• And of courseJava
• Most program code is less than 30kB
• Usually written as ROM code often as assembler or
  C
• MUST BE VERY SECURE!
• ISO/IEC have specified a number of Profiles which
  describe what an OS can/cannot do

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Examples of Memory Requirements for Functions
Source Rankl Effing, 2000
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Facts and Figures
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Credit Cards

• VISA EU allocated 100m for migration to Chip and
  PIN
• Worldwide over 1 billion
• 120 million cards in UK 58 are VISA
• Estimated in EU that Chip and PIN will reduce
  fraud by 410 million p.a.
• Card fraud costs 1 million a day in the UK alone
• During this lecture 150 fraudulent credit cards
  transactions will occur in the UK
• UK banks are considering not covering Internet
  related credit card fraud

Source credit-card uk.com
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Questions?