Master Thesis - Past Projects - Abstract

Smartcard based heart-beat service for M2M communication

ID: LIU-IDA/LITH-EX-A--10/014--SE

This study concerns machine-to-machine (M2M) applications that use smartcards. More specifically, The Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) smart card is used for the purpose of monitoring a continuous network connection between a host device and a server. Multicom Security is a security company that offers several secure communication connection services (e.g. payment transactions, alarm signals). The monitoring of these connections is carried out with continuous heart-beat messages sent from the device to a server. Today they provide this heart-beat service through logic in their own manufactured devices, but they have a desire to place the logic on a SIM card in order to be able to move such services with this card and not with a device. Such services can then also be offered on devices not necessarily manufactured by Multicom Security. The work consisted of investigation of current telecommunication standards, papers regarding smartcard applications and the current monitoring service, in order to consider possible solutions to implement a proof of concept of such solution and evaluate it. One aspect of the study was to check whether the implemented solution was general and would work in different mobile equipments and also to determine the limitations of such smartcard applications. Three solutions were considered for implementation of which one was successfully implemented and tested. The successful heart-beat application was developed using a network subscription enabled Java Card smart card and using SMS as bearer for the heart-beat messages. By evaluating the solution with basic tests of functionality, robustness, performance and compatibility the solution was considered to be general and compliant with most new mobile equipments. The evaluation was performed in real environment with the application running on an actual SIM card with network subscription tested in different mobile devices such as cell phones, built-in communication modules and alarm control panels. An alternative solution based on GRPS instead of SMS was also realized but the tests could not be carried out completely due to lack of access to the SIM card implementation by the card provider.

Keywords: SIM Toolkit, Java Card, smartcard, SMS, GPRS, heart-beat

Author(s): Marcus Erlandsson

Contact: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani