The Digital Locksmiths
Digital Locksmiths' principle
role is to provide consultancy, technical support and development services
for security and smartcard related projects. To meet these aims, the Digital Locksmiths
draw on over 25 years of smartcard experience of the founders.
The Digital Locksmiths can also access a wide variety of specialist help
from a pool of associates and former colleagues, built up over years of
active participation in the digital security industry. The combination of
in-house talent and extensive external connections means no project is either
too big or too small for the Digital Locksmiths.
We have expertise covering the full spectrum of smartcard initiatives, with particular emphasis on the following:
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Finance - EMV, ePurse;
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Government - ICAO, identity and citizen's cards;
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Transport - ITSO consultancy and product development.
Our background is in developing secure solutions - smartcard operating systems, applications and terminal software - for national passport and identity schemes, local government citizen cards, electronic purses and high security financial applicaitons for blue-chip payment companies. We can provide support for all phases of a development's life cycle - including planning, requirements capture, analysis, hardware selection, design, coding, testing, certification and support. We build security into every phase of the development, rather than trying to bolt it on as an afterthought.
The Digital Locksmiths offer an unrivalled, independent capabiltity to help our clients provide the highly reliable, feature rich and cost effective products that customers demand. Our aim is to help our customers identify and understand the risks inherent in the computational security they chose to deploy. We have a pragmatic approach based on years of experience of delivering products that work - we have teh expertise to provide the right solution for you
The Founders
Digital Locksmiths Limited was founded by two former members of Smart
Card Solutions (Sean Kelly & Martin Strauch ).
Sean Kelly
Sean founded Smart Card Solutions Ltd in 1991 and managed the company
from formation through to 2004, growing the business from two to ten
employees; later as Technical Director he was responsible for the
company's technical developments.
Sean takes a keen interest in Electronic Passports, having designed
and implemented the world's first e-Passport as deployed by Malaysia in
1998 (US patent 6041412, www.uspto.gov/patft ).
His core expertise is in the secure implementation of embedded controller
software for smartcards and similar security devices, specialising on
software defences against penetrative, disruptive and side channel attacks.
Sean has wide experience of MULTOS, having been part of the original
design team at NatWest bank, and of JavaCard, having been the technical
lead for its implementation on four different sources of smartcard chips.
He is also sits on the ITSO [ www.itso.org.uk ]
technical committee, a UK government initiative for interoperable
smartcard based ticketing.
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Martin Strauch
Martin is an expert in smartcard applications for banking. Whilst
working for NatWest Bank he was responsible for the MULTOS security
architecture, security reviews and documentation for Mondex, the bank's
famous experiment with e-purse.
Whilst at Smart Card Solutions, Martin was responsible for five
EMV smartcard development projects for both issuers. Martin's fluency
with the EMV and GlobalPlatform specifications has been key to quick
and accurate implementation of card operating systems and payment applications and their
eventual certification by both Visa and MasterCard.
Martin has wide experience of the ICAO's e-passport specifications
[ www.icao.int ] , Global Platform's
JavaCard lifecycle management and ITSO's interoperable ticketing
Standards. He was the technical support contact for AILO
[ www.ailo.org.uk ]
and the co-ordinating editor of their Codes of Practice.
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