Towards self-authenticable smart cards

Abstract

Traditionally, the smart cards have been seen as security devices, but as soon as they could be integrated into distributed and networked environments their vulnerabilities could be attempted and countermeasures against new security threats in an open-access internet were required. In this work, our target could be represented by an end-to-end mutual authentication scenario where the smart card could authenticate by itself to a Network Access Server by means of link layer protocols and therefore in absence of IP connectivity. Some previous related models based on the Extensible Authentication Protocol are presented. However, in these works the smart card and terminal implement jointly the supplicant functionality (split supplicant). We consider the native EAP multiplexing model specified by the IETF to propose a new approach in order to avoid this split and to achieve an autonomous and highly independent smart card in the authentication scheme: a self-authenticable smart card.