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A SMART CARD BASED PREPAID ELECTRICITY SYSTEM
ABSTRACT
Over the past several years, smart cards have achieved a growing
acceptance as a powerful tool for security, identification, and authorization. Financial
card issuers are moving to replace magnetic stripe cards with chip cards to reduce
counterfeiting and fraud. The increasing computational power placed on the chip along
with advances in cryptography has made the smart card a very powerful tool for
identification. The advent of multi-application smart card operating systems for both
contact and contact less applications has put smart cards on the edge of information
technology. This paper introduces a novel 3-tier smart card secure solution for prepaid
electricity. The proposed system uses an IP-based controller in addition to a power meter,
providing efficient online control of the amount of electricity consumed by the user. The
user can use the card to log in to the service provider company, as well as toping up his
smart card for additional power needed.
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1. INTRODUCTION
In the last decade, smart cards evolved from basic memory cards to complex systems
on chips with expanding processing power. This has opened the avenue to many applications
such as financial transactions, e-commerce, physical access control, health, and transportationservices.
1.1 SMART CARD
The smart card, an intelligent token, is a credit card sized plastic card embedded with
an integrated circuit chip. It provides not only memory capacity, but computational capability as
well. A smart card usually consists of a ROM or flash memory, EEPROM and a CPU. Access to
data stored on the card is under the control of the smart card operating system.
The card operating system not only makes the smart card secure for access control, but
can also store a private key for a public key infrastructure system. Lately, the industry has come
up with 32-bit smart card processors having more than 400Kbytes of EEPROM, and a memory
management and protection unit serving as a hardware firewall. This hardware firewall enables
secure separation of adjacent applications, as well as being the basis for secure downloading of
applications. The self-containment of smart card makes it resistant to attack as it does not need to
depend upon potentially vulnerable external resources. Because of this characteristic, smart cards
are often used in several applications which require strong security protection and authentication.
In addition to information security, smart cards achieve greater physical security of
services and equipments, because a smart card restricts access to all but authorized users.
Furthermore, the smart card can be used as a credit/debit bank card which allows it to be used
effectively in e-commerce applications. The multi-application smart card, along with the advent
of open platform smart card operating systems, brings the only realistic option for managing
multiple electronic transactions nowadays. It is a cost effective secure way to manage
transactions electronically Manufacturers, issuers and users have recognized the value of one
card that handles multi-applications. A multi-application card will be able to automatically
update new services and existing applications, change and store user profiles for each application
and be accepted by a range of devices-PC, POS, mobile phones. One of the most valuable
applications is in using the smart card to buy energy.
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1.2 The Outline
Domestic consumers could for instance buy energy, at a price based
on their previous consumption pattern, from any supplier wherever and whenever they
choose. When the customer wants to top up their gas or electricity credit they visit a vending
machine which uses the consumption data stored on their card to allocate a tariff and calculateshow much energy to offer the consumer for their money. Recently, the portal technology has
been playing an increasing role in computing. Service providers are rolling out portals to allow
users to create customized web sites that display exactly the information of interest. Corporations
are rolling out portals to provide employees and business partner’s customizable access to
corporate information, including news feeds from external providers, or email, calendar and
access to billing system, in addition to other web services. For web enabled energy services, and
with the advent of home networking technology, power companies and service providers can
provide value-added services delivered to the homes, like energy management, to generate
additional revenue as well as to increase convenience and loyalty. In this paper, we propose a
novel and simple prototype of a web enabled smart card based solution for controlling the
consumption of electricity in a home environment.
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2. PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
In present world users consumed more electricity. It has become
more prominent such as without electricity the entire world stops working. The whole
world becomes black or will be in Dark Age without electricity for a day. Hence to
produce electricity the natural resources such as coal and water are more used. Theseresources are volatile hence more consumption of electricity resulted in more usage of
these resources. Finally this resulted in the scarcity of these resources. Sometimes we
consume electricity without any need.
Another major problem is global warming. This is because as the resources are
used more than required the water and coal resources are exhausted. And to develop these
resources it takes decades of year time. It becomes difficult for our future generation. By
these reasons we proposed this prepaid electricity system.
Here in prepaid electricity the amount is paid before consumption so that theuser will consume the electricity only on his demand. This on-demand electricity has
became more helpful in the present days. As the natural resources are exhausting, to save
our earth from dark times and for the future generation it is very useful. This also inturn
helps in the greenery of earth.
While recharging the electricity some security reasons occurs, to avoid this
problem we developed this system through smart card. A smart card is more secure,
portal and easy to use it. Hence in this paper we propose secure and portable electricity
for the beneficial of user and earth.
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3. EXISTING SYSTEM
In existing system we are paying bills through online payment or by cash. The
electricity bill is charged after consumption. The charges are specified based on the type of
service meter whether it is for domestic purpose or non-domestic purpose. The user gets the billfor the amount of units he used in his day-to-day activities or for a particular period of time.
Due to this the user is unaware of the units he/she is consuming. In industrial places
the current has to be supplied regularly and hence most of the electricity supply is to be provided
in those areas. In the existing system the three-phase supply is given to the industrial sites and
two-phase supply for house hold activities. Based on the meter unit charge is declared.
Disadvantages User is consuming more electricity than his need due to the unaware of number of
units he is charging.
The bill payment process is so long that it takes more time for an individual to
pay their bills.
No other alternative is provided if the power supply is gone.
Regular power cuttings for saving the energy.
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4. LOGICAL FILE STRUCTURE OF A TYPICAL SMART CARD
In terms of data storage, a smart card is organized in a
hierarchical form through directories. The hierarchical architecture is divided into two
types of files. They are:
Elementary files
Dedicated files
Similar to MS-DOS, there is one master file (MF) which is like the root directory. Under
the root, we can have different files which are called elementary files (EFs). We can also
have various subdirectories called dedicated files (DFs).
Every DF is dedicated for a separate application. Under each
subdirectory will be elementary files again. The master file is implicitly selected after the
smart card is reset. The useful data that are needed for an application are located in the
elementary files (EFs). EFs may be placed directly under the MF or under a DF. Since the
MF is a special sort of DF, it goes without saying that in a single application smart card,
all application files can be placed directly Under the MF.
Additional DFs can be placed within an application DF. For example, a DF
placed directly under the MF could be dedicated to the ‘Corporate ID’ application. An
additional level of DFs within the application DF could contain the files for the languages
supported, such as ‘English’ and ‘Arabic’. Figure 1 shows logical view of a smart card
file structure.
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Figure1: logical file structure of smart card
The elementary file (EF) simply consists of a header and the body which
stores the data. The header of the file stores information about the file such as
identification number, Description, types, size, and so on. Particularly, it stores the
attribute of the file which states the access conditions and current status.
Access of the data in the file depends on whether those conditions can be
fulfilled or not. In short, the file structure of the smart card operating system is similar to
other common operating systems such as MS-DOS and UNIX. However, in order to
provide greater security control, the attribute of each file is enhanced by adding access
conditions and file status fields in the file header. Moreover, file lock is also provided to
prevent unauthorized access. This security mechanism provides a logical protection of the
smart card.
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5. PREPAID ELECTRICITY
Since the last decades of the past century, scientists,
researchers and public people have been worried about energy conservation. People
spend much more power than what they actually need and that results in a huge loss of energy. Moreover, the continuous increase in the universal energy prices has resulted in
a huge economical loss. Thus we are proposing a prepaid electricity smart card based
system so people can buy specific amount of energy to use it only when they need.
People can register for this service and charge their accounts through the
Internet. The proposed system is based on an IP-based controller called TINY, and aWATTNODE type power meter which interrupts the controller at a regular interval based
on the consumption of electricity to update the Balance based on a certain tariff.
The power meter we used, interrupts the controller at a Rate of
0.75Wph, so based on the particular tariff used and the amount of power consumptionneeded, the correct amount of money to be loaded into the card can be easily calculated
and programmed into the chip.
The unique feature about this system is that the electric utility in the
home environment can be accessed remotely from the supplier server due to the fact thatthe controller is IP-based, without the need for a PC on site, which reduces the cost of the
system drastically. People now can buy electricity in advance, using the so-called prepaid
electricity cards. The proposed prepaid smart card can also be used to manage electricity
consumption in a hotel room, as well as accessing the room itself. Thus, people canconsume only as much power as they really need.
The main role of the smart card is summarized in two things:
Authenticating the user or log in
Updating the balance in the card based on the given tariff and the electricity Consumptionprofile of the user stored in the smart card.
See Figure 2 for the proposed System.
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Figure 2: Prepaid Electricity System Design
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Figure 3: Flow Chart for Prepaid Electricity
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As shown in Figure2, the main role of the TINY IP-based controller is to control the flow of
electricity using a solid state relay, based on the consumption profile of the user. The TINY
controller is programmed to determine the exact amount of electricity measured by the power
meter by counting the exact number of interrupts corresponding to the amount of electricity
which the user intend to consume. The controller also provides remote access to the electricity
supplying company server. We used a PC/SC compatible smart card reader with ACOS1-8K
smart card.
The smart card here is used as a secure token to log in to the data base of the
company server, in a client server manner, for controlling consumption of electricity as well as
toping up the smart card with additional money. See Figure3 for the authentication and the online
purchasing protocol of the smart card based prepaid electricity system.
For recharging the smart card the following steps are involved
5.1 STEPS INVOLVED IN RECHARGING PREPAID SMART CARD:
Step 1:
Purchase / activate your card
Just pay cash at a participating retail location and your new card gets activated instantly
Step 2:
To start your electricity service
To get electricity cal the customer care service and they finalizes the enrolment of the customer
Step 3:
To recharge your smart card
Recharge the account by paying cash at any participating retail locations
Pay by phone option provided by the company
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6. Proposed Architecture
In this section, the overall design of the system is discussed in terms
of two approaches:
Two-tier architecture Three-tier architecture.
Both two and three tier architectures are examples and variations of
the well-know client/server computing model. The model was proposed as an alternative to
centralized mainframe and time sharing computing. In this model, the client interacts with the
user possibly via a GUI interface, and requests on-line services from the server. The server, on
the other hand, answers these requests and provides the services.
5.1 Three-tier architecture
The fact that this system is spread across more than two differententities suggests three-tier architecture. Such architecture brings clear logical structure to the
system. A major advantage of the three-tier architecture over the two-tier architecture is
scalability. Three-tier architecture supports hundreds of users while the two-tier architecture is
known to work well with less than 100 users. This is because the latter maintains connections
with each client while the three-tier architecture is able to manage these connections (via
queuing, for example) better due to the middle tier.
Scalability is a major requirement for our design since there could be thousands of
customers who are trying to update the balance on their prepaid electricity card and trying to
establish a session with the servers. This requirement by itself is sufficient to justify the three-tierarchitecture over the two-tier architecture.
See Figures 4 and 5 for the two-tier and three tier architectures respectively.
Figure 4: Two- Tier architecture
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Figure 5: Three Tier architecture
In addition, with the three-tier architecture most of the
application (business) logic like locating the appropriate database, checking authority, generating
query, is moved to the middle tier. Therefore, in the case of the three-tier architecture, changes in
the business logic result in less client tier changes.
Another advantage of the three-tier architecture is that its data
security is increased because the client tier no longer can access the data directly; it has to go
through the middle tier first. However, the three-tier architecture has its own disadvantages.
Disadvantages of three-tier architecture:
Designing and developing three-tier architecture software is a complex process, and
some of its available technologies are complex too (for example, J2EE technology or .NET
technology). In addition, separation of business logic from presentation logic is not always clear.
Figure 6 shows the main components of the smart card system.
Figure 6: Main components of the smart card system
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7. FUTURE WORK
The usage of prepaid electricity has been experimentally tested for some
domestic holders. The results are positive but the smart card system has been designed for a
limited people such as thousands in numbers. To make it multiple application oriented the
research has been going on. If the research is successful then the same smart card can be used formany purposes and applications at the same time.
Hence we can vision the further generations in complete usage of this prepaid
electricity system and a more applications can be generated on this report.
8. CONCLUSION
A secure smart card based system for e-payment, implemented on prepaid
electricity over the internet, was proposed. The smart card system has been designed and
implemented successfully using a three tier model client-server system, which was shown to be
superior over the two tier client-server system model. The proposed system has the benefit of
using a secure smart card to log in to the network, and control the amount of money needed to be
spent for the required electricity consumption based on the user profile stored on the card. The
proposed system has also the unique feature of using an IP-based controller which provides
remote access to company server without the additional cost of a PC. Work is ongoing for
shifting to a true open platform multiplication smart card environment.
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9. REFERENCES:
[1] Jean-Francois Dhem and Nathalie Feyt, IEEE Micro, Vol:21, issue:6, Nov-Dec 2001,
p.14-25.
[2] Dirk Huseman, Concurrency IEEE, Vol7, issue2, April-June 1999, pp.24-27.
[3] Multi-functionality for smart cards, www.oberthurusa.com/whitepapers-multi.asp
[4] John Cowburn, IEE Review, Vol:47, issue 4, July 2001.
[5] Uwe Hansmann, Lothar Merk, Martin S. Nicklous, and Thomas Stober, PervasiveComputing, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York, 2003.
[6] W. Ranki and W. Effing, Smart Card Handbook, John Wiley and Sons 2000.
[7] Mike Hendry, Smart Card Security and Applications, ARTECH HOUSE INC. 1997.
[8] Client/Server Software Architectures: An Overview, Carnegie Mellon SoftwareEngineering Institute, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/clientserver_body.html
[9] Two Tier Software Architectures, Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute,http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/twotier.html#512860
[10] Three Tier Software Architectures, Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute,
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions/threetier.html#34