Research for the Smart Card of 2010

In preparation for the activities to be launched under the 6th Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration Activities (FP61), the European Commission’s Information Society Directorate-General organised a meeting to consult the industrial and academic research community on current and future RTD needs in the domain of smart card technology. Those attending this meeting, which was held in Brussels on 23 May 2001, all agreed that the European smart card industry has major needs in R&D in various technology domains in the short and the long term. They identified the priority topics and related requirements. A lot of effort needs to be invested in RTD to ensure that Europe can maintain its current technology and industrial leadership in smart card technology domains such as chip and card design, secure embedded software, manufacturing technology and in smart card application developments. Research and development needs are still dominated by hardware related topics (smart card chips, assembly and interconnection technology, materials, production techniques), but they also involve different types of development tools (to optimise effort, time, quality for HW and SW developments), advanced security technology solutions (cryptography, security protocols, tamper resistant design, etc.) and extended features of smart card operating systems (e.g. modular architectures, open source OS). The trend, however, will be to invest more effort on SW than on HW design in future in the development of complete smart card solutions. The list of RTD priority topics to be addressed is long and the required effort and expertise to address all these issues is far beyond the possibilities of a single company or country. To cover these RTD needs a joint effort is required as well as the support of European programmes and its favourable framework for European cooperation in RTD . Cooperation is also needed to optimise resources spent on the development of new smart card products and their deployment, through the achievement of consensus of common design data formats, preparation of standards, unification of certification procedures, etc. The present report also contains written contributions received from the participants following the meeting. In these contributions the participants were asked to answer, after discussion in their own organisation, a number of additional questions: - on which topics would your organisation agree to RTD cooperation with other companies / research institutes? - what would be the estimated required effort for RTD? - what would be the specific (measurable) objectives in this area? - what would be a suitable time frame ? - how could the RTD cooperation be organised? All organisations confirmed their interest in cooperating on a selection of RTD targets in consortia composed of industrial and academic partners. Going by these responses, the total investment needed in Smart Card priority RTD areas (as identified in the present report) is put at 320 M, corresponding to approximately 74 projects to be initiated over a time frame of 5 to 8 years starting from 2002.