MUTUAL AUTHENTICATION ON JAVA CARD

Abstract

PLAID was introduced by Centrelink in 2009 and in a short time it has become one of the top choices for mutual authentication on Java smart cards. The protocol is cryptographically stronger, faster and more private, than most or all equivalent protocols currently available either commercially or via existing standards. PLAID is designed to perform a high strength mutual authentication in the 150-300 millisecond range, making it suitable for a range of mission critical contact-less applications. This work is about the complete implementation of the protocol including the applet which runs on the card and the reader application which runs on the host machine. The prime focus has been on the implementation of the protocol and to get the real performance evaluation of the protocol. It discusses about the implementation processes and also the difficulties with solutions steps and processes which are carried out. On breaking the cumulative timings of the operations of the protocol in this implementation, it could be confirmed that the claims made by the protocol to carry out a cryptographically strong mutual authentication within 300 milliseconds can be easily achieved using the PLAID protocol.