Design space exploration of power efficient embedded OS system for SmartCards

Abstract

Knowing the contents of the heap memory may be vital when optimizing memory management processes or during a release process of a Smart Card. The objective of this project is to develop a deep understanding of how the Smart Card Operating System is able to manage and store all kinds of objects, from user objects created by off-card entities to system objects created that are necessary to obtain a full operative card. Once the exploration step is completed, the second objective is to create two tools able to use these procedures to; first, be able to inspect the objects of a memory dump file and second, implement the inverted process of simulating a heap with a set of input elements. The memory heap is the portion of memory where dynamically allocated memory resides. Memory allocated from the heap will remain allocated until the memory is freed or the program terminates. In order to reach the level of knowledge to be able to create the output tools, a set of tests and debug sessions using defined input assets have been performed under a virtual Smart Card system. Since there are a large number of different object classes, a subset of them has been defined as a target for this project. The defined list includes different types of cryptography keys, elements of the file system, such as elemental files or directory files, and finally, objects related to Security Domains and Applets, both of them applications installed under the Operative System. The results of the analysis allowed the creation of a parsing engine and a construction engine for the output tools, covering all the objectives set at the beginning of the project.