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- Authors
- Dirk Balfanz
- Ed Felten
- Abstract
- Smart cards are convenient and secure. They protect sensitive
information (e.g., private keys) from malicious applications. However,
they do not protect the owner from abuse of the smart card: An
application could for example cause a smart card to digitally sign any
message, at any time, without the knowledge of the owner. In this
paper we suggest that small, hand-held computers can be used instead
of smart cards. They can communicate with the user directly and
therefore do not exhibit the above mentioned problem.
We have implemented smart card functionality for a 3COM PalmPilot. Our
implementation is a PKCS#11 module that plugs into Netscape
Communicator and takes about 5 seconds to sign an email message.
Generalizing from this experience, we argue that applications that are
split between a PC and a hand-held device can be more secure. While
such an application remains fast and convenient to use, it gains
additional security assurances from the fact that part of it runs on a
trusted device.
- Published
- Proceedings of USENIX Security '99. Washington, DC. August 1999
- Text
- GZip'ed Postscript (180k)
PDF (Adobe Acrobat) (1453k)
- See Also
- PilotKey Web site
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