EuroSeismil Encoding Firmware with Adapted Requirements
EURO6000, Systems of payment of the Confederated Savings Banks and leading company in the national market of the systems of payment, proposed, one year ago, the need to develop and make available an HSM system adapted to its functional and administrative requirements. Basically, the aim was to offer its associated savings banks a homogeneous, complete, stable and totally controlled system which would cover the different cryptographic needs of their specific financial ambit.
One of the crucial objectives of the project was for the system to be developed to be able to evolve over time and incorporate new functions in the future in a natural and non-traumatic way
EURO6000, after evaluating the professional qualification and capacity of the different companies and alternatives available on the market as a partner to approach this project, chose REALSEC, a company specialised in the development and implanting of encoding systems, and which, under the specifications of EURO6000 and with the support of its Cryptosec HSM, has collaborated in the development of a new firmware and of the necessary software modules to permit a LAN access to its cryptographic capacities.
Objectives of the project:
· To resolve the cryptographic necessities of generation and storage of keys of the businesses that are members of EURO6000. From the most common tasks to the most complex and specialized ones.
· To operate, generate, import and export both DES keys and RSA keys in agreement with the applicable standards.
· To store the keys externally to the HSM to facilitate their management. In addition it allows the sorting by types in such a way that their capacities remain clear at the hour of the generation or importation.
· To implement the security architecture designed by EURO6000.
· To permit the access by the Net to operate in on-line and batch modes.
· To present a console for administrative tasks of printing of PIN codes and keys.
System architecture
States of the HSM
The HSM shows three different states. Each state allows the execution of a precise series of functions which are its own. There are rules for the change of state which facilitate the transaction between them. This process of change is controlled by the administrator and the guardians.
· Initialisation: is the initial state of the HSM. It allows the creation of users, loading of the master key, and, in general, the configuration of the module. The HSM automatically leaves this state once the conditions are right, moving on to the production state and not returning to the state of initialisation other than in the case of resetting the system.
· Production: is the normal state of production of the system, where the tasks of the EURO6000 operative are performed.
· Authorization: through the identification of the administrator and a series of guardians, it enters into the state of authorisation. This allows administrative tasks to be performed without ceasing to attend the cards ascribed to the state of production. The administrative tasks include the registering and de-registering of users, generation, importation and exportation of keys, print functions, and in general the configuration of the HSM.
Architecture of the storage of keys
It has already been mentioned that the keys are stored in a database external to the HSM. This is one of the requirements of EURO6000. As such, these keys are stored encoded. There is no single encoding key, rather there are many, as many as there are keys. In this way, the capacities of the keys are controlled: each operation expects a key of one type and not another.
The encoding keys are not introduced externally, rather they are generated in the HSM through an algorithm of diversification of a master key provided by the guardians. The algorithm of diversification is designed in such a way that the knowledge of one of the encoding keys does not put at risk either the other encoding keys or the master key.
Implemented functionalities.The system allows the recording, importation and exportation of DES keys, of single, double or triple key length. The operations of importation and exportation allow one to work both with transport keys and with key components and, in this case, allow their printing. It is also able to generate, import and export RSA keys of up to 2048 bits
Moreover, it provides the functions needed to complete the following operations:
Calculation/Verification of digital signature.
RSA Encoding/Decoding.
DES/TDES Encoding/Decoding of confidential data.
Authorization of EMV transactions.
Security treatment of the scripts.
EURO6000 MoneyCard and associated applications.
PIN functions.
Transport protection of PIN: Irreversible PIN.
Exportation of PIN’s.
Calculation of validation codes.
NIP functions (Mobipay).
Securing of messages.
Diversification of keys.Teletoll functions.
Current State of the Project
At this moment, ESFERA is already a reality in exportation, available for all of the Savings Banks Associated to EURO6000, that progressively and depending on their necessities are acceding to this new cryptographic system facilitated by EURO6000 and based on Cryptosec (encoding technology of the REALSEC company).
