[This is not a sales pitch, but an open source contribution.]
The Android platform is great, and the number of phone models and
applications is growing rapidly.
Access to the source code allows one to contribute new functionality
that makes proper use of the existing frameworks and API's.
A team within the company Giesecke & Devrient has been focusing on
adding the security capabilities needed to enable financial
transactions, strong identities, storing personal health records or
any other service that requires a high security level.
Our first goal is to make available a "Secure Element Evaluation Kit",
consisting of
- a Secure SD card (an SD card that also contains a smartcard
controller)
- all software, with source, to develop Android applications that can
communicate with applets on the Secure SD card.
This is work in progress, and we want to continue this as an open
source project.
Therefore we are in the process of uploading our alpha release onto
the Google Code site
http://code.google.com/p/seek-for-android/
You will find there
- a project overview
- a vision paper
- the current code
- and quite a few wiki pages
We also created a Google Group for discussions:
http://groups.google.com/group/seek-for-android
We expect to have all deliverables for this cycle uploaded to the seek-
for-android site in mid November.
To make this version work on existing Android phones requires you to
make kernel changes, rebuilt the system and flash a new image.
All documentation for this, with step by step instructions, will be
provided in the wiki pages.
When this all proves stable we will try to get all these modifications
integrated into the kernel and into Android, so that newer Android
releases will work with secure elements out of the box.
At the same time we are inviting serious collaborators to join the
effort towards the somewhat longer term vision of making Android the
best platform for developing strong-security based applications.
The vision paper might be the starting point that, but we are open for
your ideas and suggestions.
Feel free to browse through the available information, post on the
seek-for-android mailing list, and become a member and volunteer your
skills and time to further the cause.
Looking forward to a lively interaction on this topic.
--
Johan Stevenson
