I’d like a little help from any knowledgeable person on tuning the inductance properties of a “proposed open source smartcard antenna”, for an educational toolkit board we built at ventavia.com for experimenting with commodity smartcard technology. The board allows one to study wireless uses and configuration of musclecards in various operational theatres – where you can add suitable electronics for each environment, to otherwise commodity components. I’d like to ship the board one day as an educational toolkit, with some cutting edge experimentation cookbook that gives the buyer a head start in open design issues.

 

The board can be used in various inductance loop environments – such as those built widely into local city streets across the US. These centralized traffic light systems already allow occupancy estimation, and per-vehicle inductive-signature correlation between remote intersections… to allow for surveillance of movement of persons in automobiles for a variety of purposes: legal fact collection following intersection accidents, traffic condition monitoring, flow rates, police incident response, and who knows what covert signals analysis purposes! The question now is: how can and how easily can the existing infrastructure usefully ping an antenna and non-antenna enabled musclecard, while you are passing over any road intersection? The complementary question then exists, what are the appropriate design properties for musclecard cardedge security/privacy that address this environmental opportunity/threat.

 

It costs about $500 to manufacture each board – which are professionally manufactured, but hand tuned/tested for component choices. In mine, I mounted a commodity-grade GEMPLUS combi SIM, and set jumpers to access the board’s onboard antenna. The antenna has parameters similar to those found in commercial USB dongles supporting combi-cards, and one can mount scoping points easily for field analysis on suitable scoping equipment. The board also has an external antenna attachment point for use in with an alternative Near Field antenna, and also other experimental antenna such as that to be design in the study I’m proposing. If you can fabricate your own LQFP packaged chips (e.g. the university EE lab) you can also play with antennas within the chip packaging itself.

 

The design issues that seem pertinent to characterize are not necessarily those of addressing id tracking and movement privacy, per se. Its not the big brother conspiracy - that is really the design focus, here. The focus is perhaps more about the degree to which general infrastructure can activate or interfere with configured security features, remotely, or the correct reporting of capabilities to discovery processes. It’s the question of whether, for example, the signals can remotely disable the bus to the crypto co-processor, remotely undelete data in certain types of EEPROM technology, or deposit covert signature information into the device’s eeprom technologies electrical fields. It’s the issue of technology _interaction_ that are perhaps the real study topics – electronic, electrical, RF, and memory technologies. Then we consider what software OS and applet design supporting a feature discovery capability should do, to accommodate commodity die with we can assume will have such properties.

 

Moving feature discovery from the host driver or traditional terminal (which rarely move) to the USB dongle reader (which moves with the chip) or to the card itself has various systemic impacts that we should understand - before choosing how to best update the current cardedge. Beyond creating proposed software changes, we have to look for and consider wider issues.

 

Peter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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