Securing Operating System Services Based on Smart Cards

Abstract. The executions of operating system services based on smart cards allow one to personalize some functionalities of the operating sys-tem by using the secret information stored in a smart card and the basic computations that a smart card can perform. However, current solutions for integrating smart card features in operating system services require at least a partial execution of the operating system functionalities at “user level”. Such executions decrease the security and the performance of the system as they are less robust compared to the kernel-level ones. In this paper we present the design and implementation of SmartK, a kernel module that integrates directly in the Linux kernel the support of smart cards. The use of SmartK allows one to securely personalize an operating system service still maintaining its execution at kernel level.