Supporting Software Evolution for Open Smart Cards by Security-by-Contract

Abstract

If all applications could be loaded at the start this would boil down to information flow analysis for which many solutions exist, but this is precisely what we want to overcome. When applications are not known in advance and can be updated asynchronously and possibly without connection to trusted third parties, we must preserve the security policies of the various owners of the applets during such autonomous evolution. This chapter illustrates the extension of the Security-by-Contract approach from mobile phones to smart cards: Security-by-Contract is based on the loading time application certification on the card that will enable the card to make autonomous decisions on application and policy updates while ensuring the compliance of every change of the platform with the security policy of each application’s owner.