A Secure and Flexible Electronic-Ticket System

With the proliferation of digitalization and steadily increasing storage and processing capacities of integrated circuits, the spectrum of potential applications of smart cards is constantly being expanded. One such application that has already enjoyed widespread adoption in different cities across the world is electronic-ticket system; commonly used for access control to public transportations as well as sports or cultural events. Both security and service quality are equally important for an effective electronic-ticket system. Traditional account based and many smart card based electronic-ticket systems are not adequate to strike a proper balance between these two requirements. To this end, we have presented a secure and flexible e-ticket system in this paper. At the core of our system lies the tamper-resistant eTRON chip which is equipped with functions for mutual authentication, encrypted communication and strong access control mechanism. The IC chip supports dual-interface in a single card that is compliant with ISO/IEC 7816 and ISO/IEC 14443 for contact and contactless interfaces respectively. In this paper, the design and implementation of the proposed system have been explained. The experimental evaluation and comparison with other existing systems showed promising results with respect to performance issues and security requirements.