Deepak Agarwal, Senior Manager – Technical Marketing, Secure Micros, STMicroelectronics, talks to Heena Jhingan about India’s smart card adoption story. Excerpts…
What is the status of smart card adoption in India? Which sectors do you think are driving this growth?
With a population of more than 1.2 billion and various e-Governance initiatives in process, India is fast adopting smart card technology. Government initiatives such as Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), PDS (Public Distribution System) already use the technology. Till now about 35 million active smart cards have been provided to BPL families under RSBY. Registrar-General of India (RGI) under the Home Ministry is conducting a pilot project of providing smart cards having biometrics for identification of citizens in select coastal states. It has already covered about 12 million people living along the coastline of nine states and four Union Territories in the first phase of the project. Many states have already migrated from paper based driving license to smart card based driving license. The smart card can hold not only the license data, but now traffic police can also enter data related to traffic violation. Therefore, there are many areas where major programs are already in progress to upgrade existing solution to smart card based solution. Recently, after mandate from RBI, the migration is happening from magnetic strip banking cards to chip based cards.
What has been the impact of this fast paced adoption on the semiconductor market?
The fast adoption of the smart card technology brings not only innovation in security and semiconductor technology, but also its adoption to provide security in the embedded system. Closely following modern trends in personal security, ST addresses the most demanding market expectations. The current product portfolio is based on 0.13 um and 90 nm in-house Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) and flash technology. Taking advantage of all the security improvements that appeared in the last two years, the ST product family is certified EMVCo and Common Criteria EAL5+/EAL/6+.
In terms of technologies, what are the key trends dominating the smart card space and how does ST plan to deal with these trends?
Traditionally, smart cards are used in ID, banking, transportation. These are mostly based on standard smart card form factor. We see the emergence of new applications to provide embedded security for different types of devices: mobile phones, PCs, printers and so on. For these types of applications, ST brings the complete system-on-chip solution which includes software too along with hardware. We offer a complete solution for Near Field Communication (NFC) and related secure element (SE) for mobile phones/tablets, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for PC/laptop security , USB token for secure secured Internet banking transactions as part of e-Commerce and machine to machine (M2M) communication. Our secure microcontrollers cover a complete range of interfaces for both contact and contactless communication, including ISO 7816, ISO 14443 Type A & B, NFC, USB, SPI and Inter-Integrated Circuit.
In the times ahead, users will prefer to carry a single card for multiple applications. What kind of pressure does this put on semiconductor players like you and how prepared are you to handle these demands?
In a scenario where people have to carry various smart cards for National ID, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), Ration card etc., it will be much easier to have one single card with various applications. Smart card technology provides the flexibility to have various applications on a single card. One very such common application in other countries is to have banking and transport in a single smart card. However, this requires collaboration between different bodies providing the services.
How critical is the semiconductor hardware bit in making smart cards secure?
A smart card contains a tamper-resistant microcontroller chip and secured memory having counter-measures against various attacks. It is difficult to forge or copy and data can be secured. ST’s secure-microcontroller platforms rely on a highly secure architecture combined with leading edge CPUs, such as ARM’s SC300 and SC000, and advanced embedded non-volatile memory technologies.
