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Leveraging Hardware Support For Security Of E-services With Etron Architecture

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With IT services penetrating literally in all spheres of our life, the need for security of personal information – that these myriad of services collect, store and process – has become more than ever before. As software security alone is not sufficient to safeguard sensitive digital information, the use of a variety of tamper-resistant devices – including smartcards, secure digital cards with integrated circuits, and mobile phones with subscriber identity module – has been on the constant increase. Recognizing the need for effective hardware security alongside sufficient software security measures, in this paper, we present the eTRON architecture – at the core of which lies the tamper-resistant eTRON chip, equipped with functions for mutual authentication, encrypted communication and robust access control mechanism. Besides the security features, the eTRON architecture also offers a wide range of functionalities through a coherent set of application programming interfaces (API) for manipulation of stored contents so that programmers can develop value-added applications in a transparent manner. In this paper, we discuss various features of the eTRON architecture, and present a few representative eTRON-based applications with a view to evaluating its effectiveness by comparing with other existing applications.