An Ontology-Based Framework to Model a GlobalPlatform Secure Element

The role of Trusted Service Manager (TSM) is essential in the Near Field Communication (NFC) ecosystem. One of its responsibilities is to manage all or part of a secure chip hosting sensible data and applications named Secure Element (SE). The management of this SE is often based on a prior knowledge of its characteristics and on business and technical agreements with the chip provider and the Issuer. In this paper, we propose a framework to ease the management and the deployment of mobile contact less services on the SE by TSMs. The proposed solution consists in a three-layer framework. At the bottom, one encounters an OWL ontology-based model of the Global Platform Card Specification. The framework allows characterizing a given SE by injecting into the reference model the SE configuration data consisting in some management rules and a description of the card content. We propose to store the SE configuration data on-card. When retrieved by the TSM, it allows having a comprehensive description of the SE and querying the model to determine the way to perform card content management operations. Finally, the framework allows exchanging the SE configuration data and, thus, facilitates the management by multiple TSMs.