Ben Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >So ... where are these rebadged smartcards deployed? Who rebadges them?
System integrators usually. The way it works is that the company that fabs the devices (typically Atmel, STMicroelectronics, or Infineon) create the silicon. Then a second-level vendor (say, Gemplus) load their firmware into the basic device and bond out the serial lines (ISO 7816) or USB lines (USB key) and then it's a GemSAFE card or a USB token (OK, Gemplus don't do USB tokens, but you know what I mean). Some companies (e.g. Infineon) do both steps themselves. For the TPM, you bond out the LPC lines instead of the USB or serial ones, and load TPM firmware instead of smart-card firmware. I'm simplifying that somewhat in that there isn't one single device into which you load one set of firmware and it's a TPM and another set of firmware and it's a smart card. Smart cards and TPMs are part of the same family of devices, where you might have 20 variants on the same basic device with 18 of the variants targeted for smart-card use and 2 targeted for TPM use. Look at Atmel's SecureAVRs for an example, there's a whole shopping-list of variations on that (ROM/RAM/EEPROM/with or without bignum accelerator/etc), and some of the shopping-list entries are targeted at TPM. But under the hood the 97SCwhatever TPM is a 90SC-family SecureAVR with different firmware. Same with STM's ST19something smart card vs. ST19something-else TPM, and Infineon's SLE66CX smart card vs. SLE66CX TPM - they're just smart cards with clever marketing. Peter. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]