Structural Properties of Cryptographic Sequences - Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems - page 163

- HASH function: SHA-1.
- ECC key length: 113, 131, 163, and 193 bits in binary fields, and 112, 128,
160, and 192 bits in prime fields.

In comparison to the previous version, Java Card 2.2.2 included new MAC and
hash functions. More precisely, in this version programmers were able to use the
following functions that were not previously available: SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-
512, HMAC-SHA-1, HMAC-SHA-256, HMAC-SHA-384, and HMAC-SHA-512.

4 Smart Cards Used in the Tests and Applet
Development

The smart card models used in the tests presented in this contribution, namely
JCOP 41 and JCOP J3A, have been kindly provided by NXP Semiconductors.
All the information presented in this section is publicly available at the NXP
web site [17,18,19].
Table 1 summarizes the main characteristics of JCOP 41 [17,18] and JCOP
J3A cards [17,19]:
It must be clarified at this point that the JCOP 41 product implements ECC
for curves defined over F 2 m , while the JCOP J3A model allows to use elliptic

curves defined over F p . This is the reason why the available key sizes are not

the same in those cards (131, 163, and 193 bits in JCOP 41 cards, and 128, 160,
and 192 in JCOP J3A cards). For comparison purposes, in practice we will treat
keys of similar lengths as if they were of the same size, as the difference in bits
is not significant (131 vs 128, 163 vs 160, and 193 vs 192).
The applets for the JCOP 41 and JCOP J3A products have been developed
by us using the Eclipse software (version 3.2) and the JCOP Tools plug-in for
Eclipse kindly provided by NXP Semiconductors. This plug-in allows to easily
compile, download and install Java Card applets in the JCOP smart cards.
With the goal of producing a valid comparison, we decided to implement the
same ECIES functionality in both platforms, with the sole exception of the finite
fields and the key lengths used (binary finite fields with key lengths of 131, 163,
and 193 bits in JCOP 41 cards, and prime finite fields with key lengths of 128,
160, and 192 in JCOP J3A cards).

Table 1. JCOP 41 and JCOP J3A features

JCOP 41 JCOP J3A
Hardware module P5CT072 P5CD080
CPU Secure MX51 Secure MX51
Operating system JCOP 2.2.1 JCOP 2.4.1
Java Card version 2.2.1 2.2.2
GlobalPlatform version 2.1.1 2.1.1
ROM 160 Kbytes 200 Kbytes
EEPROM 72 Kbytes 80 Kbytes
RAM 4608 bytes 6144 bytes
Cryptographic coprocessors 3DES and PKI 3DES, AES, and PKI