28-07-2014, 12:08 PM
A SMART CARD BASED PREPAID ELECTRICITY SYSTEM
A SMART CARD BASED.pdf (Size: 295.96 KB / Downloads: 131)
ABSTRACT
Over the past several years, smart cards have achieved a growing acceptance as a
powerful tool for security, identification, and authorization. Financial card issuers are
moving to replace magnetic stripe cards with chip cards to reduce counterfeiting and
fraud. The increasing computational power placed on the chip along with advances in
cryptography has made the smart card a very powerful tool for identification. The advent
of multi-application smart card operating systems for both contact and contact less
applications has put smart cards on the edge of information technology. This paper
introduces a novel 3-tier smart card secure solution for prepaid electricity. The proposed
system uses an IP-based controller in addition to a power meter, providing efficient
online control of the amount of electricity consumed by the user. The user can use the
card to log in to the service provider company, as well as toping up his smart card for
additional power needed.
INTRODUCTION
In the last decade, smart cards evolved from basic memory cards to complex systems on
chips with expanding processing power. This has opened the avenue to many
applications such as financial transactions, e-commerce, physical access control, health,
and transportation services [1]. The smart card, an intelligent token, is a credit card sized
plastic card embedded with an integrated circuit chip. It provides not only memory
capacity, but computational capability as well. A smart card usually consists of a ROM or
flash memory, EEPROM and a CPU. Access to data stored on the card is under the
control of the smart card operating system.
The card operating system not only makes the smart card secure for access control, but
can also store a private key for a public key infrastructure system. Lately, the industry has
come up with 32-bit smart card processors having more than 400Kbytes of EEPROM,
and a memory management and protection unit serving as a hardware firewall. This
hardware firewall enables secure separation of adjacent applications, as well as being the
basis for secure downloading of applications. The self-containment of smart card makes
LOGICAL FILE STRUCTURE OF A TYPICAL SMART CARD
In terms of data storage, a smart card is organized in a hierarchical form through
directories. Similar to MS-DOS, there is one master file (MF) which is like the root
directory. Under the root, we can have different files which are called elementary files
(EFs). We can also have various subdirectories called dedicated files (DFs). Every DF is
dedicated for a separate application. Under each subdirectory will be elementary files
again. The master file is implicitly selected after the smart card is reset. The useful data
that are needed for an application are located in the (EFs). EFs may be placed directly
under the MF or under a DF. Since the MF is a special sort of DF, it goes without saying
that in a single application smart card, all application files can be placed directly under
the MF. Additional DFs can be placed within an application DF. For example, a DF
placed directly under the MF could be dedicated to the ‘Corporate ID’ application. An
additional level of DFs within the application DF could contain the files for the
languages supported, such as ‘English’ and ‘Arabic’. Figure 1 shows logical view of a
smart card file structure.
PREPAID ELECTRICITY
Since the last decades of the past century, scientists, researchers and public people
have been worried about energy conservation. People spend much more power than what
they actually need and that results in a huge loss of energy. Moreover, the continuous
increase in the universal energy prices has resulted in a huge economical loss. Thus we
are proposing a prepaid electricity smart card based system so people can buy specific
amount of energy to use it only when then need. People can register for this service and
charge their accounts through the Internet. The proposed system is based on an IP-based
controller called TINY, and a WATTNODE type power meter which interrupts the
controller at a regular interval based on the consumption of electricity to update the
balance based on a certain tariff. The power meter we used, interrupts the controller at a
CONCLUSION
A secure smart card based system for e-payment, implemented on prepaid electricity over
the internet, was proposed. The smart card system has been designed and implemented
successfully using a three tier model client-server system, which was shown to be
superior over the two tier client-server system model. The proposed system has the
benefit of using a secure smart card to log in to the network, and control the amount of
money needed to be spent for the required electricity consumption based on the user
profile stored on the card. The proposed system has also the unique feature of using an
IP-based controller which provides remote access to company server without the
additional cost of a PC. Work is ongoing for shifting to a true open platform
multiplication smart card environment