Approved
SIM Emulator
Anders Lord (D) and Björn UUsitalo (D)
Start
2011-03-21
Presentation
2011-09-29 13:15
Location:
LTH E:3139
Finished:
2011-11-25
Master's thesis:
(Contact supervisor)
Abstract
Today SIM cards are used to authenticate the users in a mobile network. SIM cards are to most people the little plastic card that holds your phone number and address book. However in practice the SIM is actually an application implemented on what is called an Integrated Circuit Card (ICC). Originally SIM cards were used in Mobile devices to provide a protected place to store the network authentication mechanisms. However over time more and more functionality have been moved into the SIM. This works well for phones and other devices interacting with humans, but less well for a new set of mobile devices that are not directly operated by humans. For such devices, known as machine-tomachine (M2M) devices the SIM card is no longer practical since it both complicates development and production as well as increasing maintenance costs. For example changing operator for a large set of remote metering equipment would be prohibitively expensive in labour costs. For this reason Ericsson has developed a SIM emulator moving the SIM application from the ICC card into the device and it’s own security features. During this thesis we will improve the existing SIM emulator, fully implementing the protocols used by normal SIM card and evaluating other aspects. One such aspects is to investigate determine the minimum amount of data required to connect M2M devices to a network. The thesis is divided into 3 parts, researching the standards involved in the SIM as well as other related theory used in the existing emulator, investigating the minimum data/feature set experimentally, and designing and implementing the missing features required in the emulator.
Supervisor: Ben Smeets (EIT)
Examiner: Thomas Johansson (EIT)