Hello, I'd be interested if somebody here has practical experience with "Secure Messaging" modes in general and would be so kind to answer a few questions:
In authentic as well as in combined mode, the use of symmetric ciphers seems to be the standard approach. To migitate simple MITM techniques, at least one keypair must be already integrated into ROM/EEPROM at the production/personalization stage and kept secret. As a result, SM can only be used with designated terminals from a single emitting instance (or partner organizations) that have knowledge about this secret key. This defeats interoperability as a whole and reminds me to the infamous "security by obscurity" solutions popular in former decades. Are there any practical attempts to negotiate keys for SM by use of public keys? What is the impact in terms of computation time for encrypted transfer at the moment, compared to a plain transmission? (Last info: x4) Plain signature functionality is neither time-critical and generally uses basic facilities available on nearly every token. As digital signatures slowly gain acceptance outside specialized applications, are there any ambitions to secure the card-to-terminal communication by default? Isn't it urgently necessary to use ad-hoc interoperable security routines in the light of the legal status of digital signatures within the EU? Thanks a lot for your efforts. All the best, /Markus _______________________________________________ opensc-devel mailing list opensc-devel@lists.opensc-project.org http://www.opensc-project.org/mailman/listinfo/opensc-devel
