Authenticating Mandatory Access Controls and Preserving Privacy for a High-Assurance Smart Card

This paper presents an authentication protocol for high-assurance smart card operating systems that support download of mutually suspicious applications. Such a protocol is required to be part of the operating system, rather than the traditional smart card approach of allowing applications to do authentication, because strong authentication is essential for the operating system to protect one application from another. The protocol itself is based on the existing IKE protocol [23], used for authentication in IPSEC. What is new is the integration of an IKE-like protocol with authentication of mandatory secrecy and integrity access controls, the recognition that a single PKI-hierarchy cannot certify identity and all possible mandatory access rights, and the use of IKE to resolve privacy problems found in existing smart card authentication protocols.