Margus Freudenthal, Sven Heiberg & Jan Willemson
Cybernetica
Estonia

The reliability of a public-key cryptography based digital signature depends on two major aspects - authentity of the public key and security of the private key. The first problem is generally solved by an appropriate PKI, whereas the second problem requires building a Personal Security Environment (PSE). This article presents one possible solution for PSE consisting of the union of a Palm PDA and a smart card reader. We study security concerns of the PSE, choice of platform for our solution, the existing frameworks for building security applications on Palm PDA and point out their limitations together with possible improvements. The article's concluding part discusses the ways for development of our solution as well as some general problems to be solved by the future PSEs.

Read Paper (in PDF)