EUCC Guidelines on CSP-based evaluation in the context of Secure Elements

This guideline document relates to the evaluation of applications using a Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) and describes a methodology for such evaluations.

The use of a CSP addresses the scaling problem of the classical smart card composite approach when applications are intended to run on a variety of chip platforms. Unlike a cryptographic library, a CSP provides a defined set of complete and encapsulated security services such as protocols, signature creation, authentication via a harmonised API. The harmonised API realises a kind of an abstraction layer so that different CSP implementations on different chip platforms present the same behaviour to the applications. 

The CSP implementations need to be certified at EAL4 augmented with AVA_VAN.5 using the classical smartcard composite evaluation approach. The advantage of the use of a harmonised CSP is that the applications do not need to implement highly critical security services, e.g., processing of secret keys. This may both:

• help risk owners to accept a lower assurance level for the application.
• avoid going for composite evaluations for each chip platform configuration intended to host the application. Instead of that, one composition certification according to CC class ACO can be conducted with a representative CSP implementation.

Different CSP types with different sets of security services and different API are possible. Within one CSP type, the implemented security services, and the API need to be the same for the different implementations on different chip platforms.