Recovering from a lost digital wallet: A smart cards perspective extended abstract

Multi-application smart cards enable a user to potentially have a diverse set of applications on her smart card. The growing trend of services convergence fuelled by Near Field Communication and smart phones has made multi-application smart cards a tangible reality. In such an environment, cardholders might have a number of applications on their smart cards and if a card is lost, all of the applications would be lost with it. In addition, consumers might decide to upgrade their smart cards and require a seamless and secure framework to migrate their applications from the old smart card to the new one. Currently, the recovery of a smart card-based service might take from a day to a week at best as each of the lost cards can only be replaced by the respective card issuer, during which time the card issuer might lose business from the user because she is not able to access the provisioned services. Similarly, there is at present no migration mechanism proposed for smart card applications. The proposed framework in this paper enables a user to acquire a new smart card as she desires and then migrate/restore all of her applications onto it—allowing her to recover from her lost digital wallet in a secure, efficient, seamless and ubiquitous manner.