Smart Card Applications and Mobility in a World of Short Distance Communication

CASTING Project

a cooperation between
ETH Zürich, Distributed Systems Group and
Swisscom AG Bern, Corporate Technology

Abstract

Michael Rohs, Harald Vogt

The CASTING project is concerned with the application of smart card technology in combination with short distance wireless communication. This report focuses on secure access to Web pages, meaning that the right person has access to his or her personal Web pages in a manner that respects integrity, authenticity and confidentiality. This requires authentication of users, which is achieved by providing users with public-key certificates and the corresponding private keys, stored in a mobile device. The mobile device contains a smart card that stores the user's certificate and the user's private key and executes the necessary operations to convince the remote Web server about the identity of the local user.

The CASTING project is part of a cooperation between the Distributed Systems Group at ETH Zurich and Swisscom AG Bern, Corporate Technology. This report describes phase 2 of the CASTING project. Phase 1 was done by researchers at EPFL and focused on protocols for secure spontaneous connections. The work described in this report was done at ETH Zurich and funded by Swisscom. Contact persons are Prof. Friedemann Mattern at ETH Zurich, and Karin Busch and Michael Deichmann at Swisscom.