The Open Standard for Public Transport Alliance makes its debut

December 08, 2010 // Julien Happich

Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), Infineon Technologies, INSIDE Secure and Oberthur Technologies have joined forces at Cartes & Identification 2010 to launch the Open Standard for Public Transport (OSPT) Alliance while promoting at the same time their own open security standard developed for transit fare collection, known as Cipurse.

Open to new members, the alliance will work to establish an ecosystem of transit operators, technology suppliers, consultants and integrators, government agencies, and mobile ecosystem product and service provider to develop new, interoperable transit fare collection solutions based on open-standard security.

This OSPT Alliance ecosystem will offer transit operators the opportunity to choose from among a number of vendors, consultants and integrators to help them deploy or upgrade to a more secure and cost-effective transit fare collection system.

According to the founding members, Government agencies that need to evaluate bids for new or upgraded transit payment systems will have access to a much broader array of solution vendors and partners delivering a wider range of innovative, flexible and secure transit fare collection solutions.

The OSPT Alliance ecosystem is also expected to benefit transit system consultants and integrators by bringing together a greater assortment of vendors offering more product choices and richer capabilities than available with proprietary systems. For mobile device manufacturers, the open security standard could be the next 'must-have' checklist item they include in all next-generation NFC implementations.

The OSPT Alliance is currently developing the initial version of the open security standard, as well as documentation and reference implementations, which will enable technology suppliers to deliver more secure and interoperable transit fare collection solutions for cards, stickers, fobs, mobile phones and other consumer devices, as well as infrastructure components.

The open standard should promote vendor neutrality, cross-vendor system interoperability, lower technology adoption risks, higher quality and improved market responsiveness, all of which result in lower operating costs and greater flexibility for transport system operators.

Open security standard

The Cipurse open security standard defines an authentication scheme, a secure messaging protocol, four minimum mandatory file types and a minimum mandatory command set to access these file types. It also specifies encryption keys and access conditions. Its security mechanisms include a unique cryptographic protocol that encourages fast and efficient implementation with robust, inherent protection against differential power analysis (DPA) and differential fault analysis (DFA).

This without requiring dedicated hardware measures, eliminating the need for a massive overhead of software and hardware countermeasures against these attacks. The aim is to enable cost-efficient protection against counterfeiting, cloning, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks and other security risks that threaten the integrity of transit fare collection systems.

The newly launched standard builds upon existing, proven, open standards the ISO 7816 smart card standard, as well as the 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES-128) and the ISO/IEC 14443-4 protocol layer to provide a platform for securing both new and legacy transit fare collection applications.

Fare collection systems built on such a standard could enable users to pay with simple, standalone tickets as well as multi-application cards, microSD cards and NFC mobile phones, seamlessly across several modes of transport in different locations, even across different regions and systems. Beijing-based Watchdata Technologies Ltd. and the Open Ticketing Institute of the Netherlands have already joined the OSPT Alliance.

Visit the OSPT Alliance at www.osptalliance.org

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