That's not cruel, that's a business and security practice: imagine that card
free space is sorta "rented" by card owners to application providers :-)
And allowing to install evil applications on already issued cards is always
a bad thing, even if it cannot harm other on-card applications : There's an
applet firewall that enforces strict data sharing rules, who usually prevent
any bit to cross application boundaries!

Sebastien

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 1:30 AM, Daniel Benoy <[email protected]> wrote:

> Great, thanks for the reply :)  I've been googling all over, but I
> couldn't really find an explanation for this basic question.  For some
> reason that baffles me, smart cards aren't popular even among the nerdy
> community :p
>
> So, would I be correct in saying that you get no security benefit from
> changing the issuer domain key, except that whoever gets your card would
> be unable to use it for their own stuff?  That actually sounds like a
> cruel 'feature', to poison the cards against competitors.  (Prevent me
> from wiping out my visa card and installing MuscleCard on it, for
> example :p)
>
> I suppose perhaps there's some hypothetical scenario, though, where
> someone could secretly take your card, and install some malicious
> program on it, which stores their pin or otherwise does something
> tricky...  Hm.
>
> On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 23:11 +0200, Sébastien Lorquet wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > GP keys are used to manage the card contents, ie add/remove applets
> > and packages.
> >
> > The worst an attacker can do is remove the applet instance along with
> > its data and reinstanciate it. But data allocated in the applet is
> > never readable from the outside, otherwise banks would not use chip
> > credit cards :-)
> >
> > You current keys are probably 404142434445464748494A4B4C4D4E4F, like
> > all development cyberflex cards :)
> > So they're not really secret until you change them using the PUT KEY
> > command.
> > but don't forget to write them down somwewhere in a secure place :-)
> >
> > In general if the card is for you only, you don't need to change the
> > security domain keys.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Sebastien
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Muscle mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > http://lists.drizzle.com/mailman/listinfo/muscle
>
> _______________________________________________
> Muscle mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.drizzle.com/mailman/listinfo/muscle
>
>
_______________________________________________
Muscle mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.drizzle.com/mailman/listinfo/muscle

Reply via email to