The new offering will bring together the two pillars of security trust and privacy, a key component for many applications in today’s digital world.
“ETSI specified the first SIM card in the late 1980s as well as the secure platform for all the following generations of SIMs. With 5G and IoT coming up, there was a need to go beyond this field-proven platform and think of innovative form factors and features that would address new market requirements and provide a secure platform for all security-sensitive industry sectors,” says Klaus Vedder, chairman of the ETSI Technical Committee Smart Card Platform.
The ETSI Smart Secure Platform offers an open platform for multiple applications with various physical interfaces and form factors. The new flexible file system and built-in capabilities support several authentication methods, as well as features defined for a universal integrated circuit card (UICC) – the current security platform used, for instance, for the SIM card – such as a toolkit or a contactless interface. SSP is a highly secure, scalable, therefore cost-efficient solution optimised to fit many requirements, from IoT applications to complex solutions, hosting several applications such as banking and payment, ID management and access to mobile networks. Furthermore, the SSP is backwards compatible with the UICC.
The three specifications in question detail the technical characteristics of the Smart Secure Platform with ETSI TS 103 666-1, the integration of the Secure Element into a System on Chip (SoC) solution in ETSI TS 103 666 2 and as the first protocol between the Smart Secure Platform and the outside world, the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), which is specified in ETSI TS 103 713.
Although the first implementations of are expected to be in the field of IoT and 5G, the Smart Secure Platform is designed to work in other industry sectors such as banking, transport and ID, to name a few.
