Oberthur Technologies

More than other IT domains, the smart card industry is facing the challenge to reinvent itself in the fast moving high-tech area where seamless connection, mobility and security are key aspects. This breakthrough is only possible by changing the fundamentals of the smart card and by creating a new and open technology platform. The smart card has been successful in providing a first generation of secure, personalized and portable device to millions of users principally in off-line applications such as bank and telecom. INSPIRED will develop the second generation called Trusted Personal Device (TPD) to provide Trust and Security to users and on-line services in the future ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing environments. The concept of an individual object representing the root of trust is the paradigm which definitely made the success of the smart card. INSPIRED intends to rely on it and to extend it to the next generation of secure communicating devices. These devices will have different form factors and features depending of the targeted applications. INSPIRED aims at defining the common technical foundations to allow cost-efficient product developments of devices with extended features and performances that can better be integrated in heterogeneous networks. The INSPIRED consortium gathers the large majority of the stakeholders in the European smart card arena including the major smart card manufacturers, vendors of chips and sensors for smart cards and leading research institutes. The consortium also includes companies representing Users from dynamic market segments such as Telecom, electronic ID, on-line services and digital rights management for requirements, concept definition and validation of the project results. INSPIRED is in-line with the RTD requirements identified by the RESET roadmap and will deliver the industry standard architectures for next generation devices that will overcome current technology heterogeneity and limitations.

The major objective of the Carbine project is to establish a cost effective display technology and to provide the smart card market with thin, flexible, low consumption bistable display modules compliant with this market specifications and which can be easily integrated into actual smart cards. The Carbine project will also impulse, through a detailed business plan, the actions needed to produce at very term the mass production of such display modules. Work description: The project can be split into 7 major parts: - Display module and smart card applications specification (performances and interfaces at system and sub-system levels) - Development of the LCD display (design and development of technical and technological solutions including the manufacturing of parts needed for the project). - Development of control, command and interface circuits (design and development of technical solutions, including the subcontract of the manufacturing concerning some parts needed for project) - Development of the module assembly (design and development of technical solutions allowing to transfer the ASIC on the LCD display and to interconnect the display module with the remaining parts of the smart cart) - Integration and tests of the display module assembly to confirm its performances and its ability to be integrated by smart card integrators. - Design, development, integration, demonstration and evaluation of 2 applicative configurations specified by 2 major smart card integrators. One will demonstrate a solution using electrical contacts to allow the refreshment of the data, the other will demonstrate a contact less solution. These 2 integrators will perform the functional and environmental tests and check the integration capability of the display module. - Built of complete business plan concerning the manufacturing of such a "flexible bistable display module", identifying all the industrial facilities and resources needed, sales actions required, recurring and non recurring associated costs, intellectual property situation and potential manufacturing sites, in order to be able to launch the mass production at the end of the project. These 7 parts will be related to 8 Work packages (because of the 2 smart card integrators) referenced from WP1 to WP8. An additional work package (WP0) concerns the overall project management. Milestones: Project milestones are defined at points where needed parts, services and technologies are realised or defined, e.g. definition of flexible display technology, availability of ASIC's definition files, realisation of first display module. The results of the project will be an exploitable bistable flexible LCD technology from a European source demonstrated in smart card applications.

The AREHCC project will do research and product development on the field of applied public key cryptography. Main focus is to develop new algorithms to efficiently implement 'Elliptic Curve Cryptography' (ECC) and 'Hyper-elliptic Curve Cryptography' (HCC) on embedded systems as smart cards and terminal ICs or servers. ECC/HCC offers the advantage of shorter en/decryption key length and higher inherent performance. On the other hand to fully exploit an effective implementation on smart cards it requires optimisation effort from all disciplines being mathematics, cryptography, soft- and hardware engineering. The present consortium offers all mentioned disciplines at highest reputation level. Currently, patents on the field of ECC prevent the use of this promising technology. It is also aimed to develop solutions not infringing existing patents and further influencing standardisation. OBJECTIVES AREHCC project aims at developing Public-key cryptography technology to increase: (1) security level for electronic signature, key encryption and key exchange over unsecured networks, (2) performance for implementation on low power microchips such as Smart Cards for banking, mobile phones (SIM cards) and pay-TV. The project will explore recent mathematic concepts called Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HCC), which look promising with respect to security and performance. It is intended to develop and test fast, condensed (small key format), and secure algorithms based on ECC/HCC hardcoded into Smart Cards and terminal co-processors. Developments will be made compatible with the new cryptography system AES. Influencing emerging cryptographic standards, such as ISO/IEC 9979, IPsec, X.509 is intended. DESCRIPTION OF WORK The AREHCC project will analyse algebraic structures where the exponentiation may be easily computed using few computing power and few memory, but where the 'Discrete Logarithm Problem' may be unbreakable even by intruders using very high computing power. The first research topic will be to develop methods for ensuring that there are no fiback-doorsfl in ECC and HCC. As some known 'back-doors' are strongly correlated to the number of points on the curve, we will develop reasonably fast algorithms to compute this number of points as well as methodologies to avoid this kind of 'back-door'. Fundamental research work will be fulfilled in the field of HCC: project work will be focused on HCC genus 2, maybe genus 3, and curve. Research will be then performed to measure HCC algorithms speed and computing power and simulate their performance in order to compare them with ECC. Once secure ECC&HCC curve have been selected, algorithms will be implemented on the computer. The next research level will be to optimise running time in order to save computer power and memory size. Moreover the implementation of theses algorithms on Smart Card and terminal controller silicon will be analysed and simulation tools will be developed to measure resistance to sophisticated electronic spying attacks. Research will be performed to mask the algorithm computation method in order to resist to attacks related to electrical consumption or radio emission during the execution of the algorithm by the processor.

The major objective of the Carbine project is to establish a cost effective display technology and to provide the smart card market with thin, flexible, low consumption bistable display modules compliant with this market specifications and which can be easily integrated into actual smart cards. The Carbine project will also impulse, through a detailed business plan, the actions needed to produce at very term the mass production of such display modules. Work description: The project can be split into 7 major parts: - Display module and smart card applications specification (performances and interfaces at system and sub-system levels) - Development of the LCD display (design and development of technical and technological solutions including the manufacturing of parts needed for the project). - Development of control, command and interface circuits (design and development of technical solutions, including the subcontract of the manufacturing concerning some parts needed for project) - Development of the module assembly (design and development of technical solutions allowing to transfer the ASIC on the LCD display and to interconnect the display module with the remaining parts of the smart cart) - Integration and tests of the display module assembly to confirm its performances and its ability to be integrated by smart card integrators. - Design, development, integration, demonstration and evaluation of 2 applicative configurations specified by 2 major smart card integrators. One will demonstrate a solution using electrical contacts to allow the refreshment of the data, the other will demonstrate a contact less solution. These 2 integrators will perform the functional and environmental tests and check the integration capability of the display module. - Built of complete business plan concerning the manufacturing of such a "flexible bistable display module", identifying all the industrial facilities and resources needed, sales actions required, recurring and non recurring associated costs, intellectual property situation and potential manufacturing sites, in order to be able to launch the mass production at the end of the project. These 7 parts will be related to 8 Work packages (because of the 2 smart card integrators) referenced from WP1 to WP8. An additional work package (WP0) concerns the overall project management. Milestones: Project milestones are defined at points where needed parts, services and technologies are realised or defined, e.g. definition of flexible display technology, availability of ASIC's definition files, realisation of first display module. The results of the project will be an exploitable bistable flexible LCD technology from a European source demonstrated in smart card applications.

The objective of this project is to develop and implement a complete secured system with enhanced identification, authentication and access control schemes for applications over Internet such as tele-working and Web-banking services. One of the major innovations of this project will be to obtain an enhanced security system by combining classical security protocols with robust multimodal verification schemes based on speech and image. The project include the following objectives: 1. The development of scalable and robust multimodal verification algorithms; 2. The development of scalable classifier combination techniques (fusion); 3. The design and implementation of an overall secure architecture including security protocols adapted to biometrics; 4. The development of three demonstrators (a teleworking, a home banking and a biometric ATM demonstrators). Work description: In the first phase of the project, real condition databases for image and speech will be collected at several partners sites using pre-defined hardware to form a common and meaningful basis for algorithm evaluation and refinement. Prior to the recordings, detailed specifications will be made to ensure compatibility and usability of the data acquired at various sites. The availability of this database will be an essential step to develop and evaluate biometrics technology suitable to user needs in the framework of the envisaged applications. Concurrently, an early stage demonstrator (Pilot demonstrator) will be developed based on background technology for verification, and on State-Of-the-Art technology for network security protocols (coming from the European projects M2VTS and OKAPI). Shortly after the beginning, the project will focus on technology development that is in multimodal verification and network security (including cryptology). For verification techniques, the major goal will be to develop techniques that are robust to changing environment, distance to the sensors (camera and microphones) and other adverse conditions such as moving background or variable lighting for image, noisy environment for speech. For network security, the whole security architecture shall be specified, with different variants: centralised, non-centralised authentication. Particularly, the link with biometrics features stored into the smart card will be carefully studied. The cryptographic algorithms will be reviewed to tackle with the specificity of the biometrics data whose importance is not to be neglected. At the end of this period, a first complete system will be available. In the third phase of the project, three demonstrators (a teleworking, a home banking and a biometric ATM) will be built, and tested at developer sites. Final field tests will be conducted for all three applications by companies and end users. Milestones: The major Milestones of the project are: 1. The availability of the real condition multimodal database. 2. The development of scalable and robust multimodal (speech and image) algorithms. 3. The development of a whole secure system architecture integrating classical security protocols and biometrics authentication. 4. The development of 3 demonstrators for Banking and Teleworking applications.