Common use of Smart Card Clause in Contracts

Smart Card. Smart cards are small, portable, tamper-resistant devices providing users with convenient storage and processing capability. Because of their unique form factor, smart cards are proposed for use in a wide variety of applications such as electronic commerce, identification, and health care. The majority of the smartcards on the market today have between 128 and 1024 bytes of RAM, 1 and 16 kilobytes of EEPROM, and 6 and 16 kilobytes of ROM with the traditional 8-bit CPU typically clocked at a mere 3.57 megahertz. To be practical for widespread use, however, smart cards also need to be inexpensive. Any addition to memory or processing capacity increases the cost of each card because both are extremely cost sensitive. Smart cards are also slow transmitters, so to achieve acceptable application speeds, data elements must be small. Thus ECC is a perfect choice for smart cards for the following reasons [9]: The strength of the ECDLP algorithm means that strong security is achievable with proportionately smaller key and certificate sizes. The smaller key size in turn means that less EEPROM is required to store keys and certificates and that less data needs to be passed between the card and the application so that transmission times are shorter. As smart card applications require stronger security, ECC can continue to provide the security with proportionately fewer additional system resources without increasing their cost. Other public -key systems involve so much computation that a dedicated hardware device known as a crypto coprocessor is required. The crypto coprocessors not only take up precious space, they add about 20 to 30 percent to the cost of the chip. With ECC, the algorithm can be implemented in available ROM, so no additional hardware is required to perform strong, fast authentication. With ECC, the time needed to generate a key pair is so short that even a device with the very limited computing power of a smart card can generate the key pair, provided a good random number generator is available. In this paper, we had proposed a design for remote authentication key agreement scheme based on ECC using smart cards. We discuss the elliptic curve cryptography in section 2. In section 3 we present the scheme. In section 4, we show the security analysis. In section 5 we show the cost and functionality consideration among our scheme and the related schemes. Finally, we make a conclusion in Section 6.