SCP Activity Report 2018-2019

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Chairman: Klaus Vedder, Samsung R&D Institute UK

Responsible for the development and maintenance of specifications for secure elements (SEs) in a multi-application capable environment, the integration into such an environment, as well as the secure provisioning of services making use of SEs.

ETSI’s Smart Card Platform committee (TC SCP) develops and maintains specifications for the Secure Element (SE) for its use in telecommunication systems including the Internet of Things (IoT). The remote management of SEs and the interfaces required for the interaction of servers involved in this management are also addressed. TC SCP develops ‘agnostic’ specifications that can find their way into other applications such as ID management, ticketing and ID cards with contactless interfaces used in financial services. It is of particular importance for the user that for each topic addressed, TC SCP’s specifications encompass not only requirements and the technical solution but also conformance testing for both the SE and the terminal.

TC SCP is the home of the UICC – the most widely deployed Secure Element with more than five billion pieces entering the market every year just as SIM cards.

Trust and privacy in IoT and mobile applications are crucial market drivers. As such, our next-generation platform, the Smart Secure Platform (SSP) will contribute significantly to achieving these goals. The objective is a more flexible platform that can be adapted to multiple different products and markets, while maintaining a common set of features and some of the characteristics of the UICC platform. SSP will offer an open platform for multiple applications, a choice of physical interfaces and form factors to adapt to market needs (e.g. SPI, I2C, integrated into a SoC), a new modern and flexible file system, built-in capabilities to support multiple authentication methods (e.g., biometric). In high-end deployments, the SSP will be faster and more flexible than what can be achieved with the UICC, while continuing to support existing features such as toolkit and the contactless interface.

To advance this new platform TC SCP was supported in 2018 by an STF for the technical realization of the SSP. The result of this work will, as a first step, consist of two specifications: one containing the general characteristics and one describing the specific case of the SSP integrated into a SoC solution. This is of particular interest for IoT applications as it vastly reduces the complexity and cost of deployment of a Secure Element. These two specifications and the underlying requirement specification, which is under change control, are expected to be published during 2019. As a next step TC SCP will consider the embedded SSP and the removable SSP.

Part of our activities in 2018 featured the maintenance and advancement of the more than 50 specifications on the UICC and, in particular, the update of the test specifications. The latter especially included the review of existing test cases and the definition of new ones specific for those IoT devices which do not implement the full feature functionality specified.

The work of TC SCP is based on input from both inside and outside ETSI, and the committee therefore continues to liaise with major external contributors such as GlobalPlatform, the GSM Association, 3GPP, 3GPP2, the NFC Forum, the OMA, the Global Certification Forum (GCF), oneM2M, the PCS Type Certification Review Board (PTCRB) and the SIMalliance. TC SCP also provides and maintains the application identity register for smart card applications on behalf of a number of these and other organizations.

A full list of all active and completed work and detailed information relating to them can be found on the committee’s ‘Work Item Monitoring’ page on the ETSI Portal.

 LOOK OUT FOR IN 2019 – TC SCP WORK IN PROGRESS:

• Smart Secure Platform (SSP), the next generation secure platform:
  • Requirements for next release
  • Technical realization: (i) general; (ii) integrated into System on Chip (SoC) solution; (iii) embedded SSP
• Update of test specifications