International Organization for Standardization

Identification cards - Integrated circuit cards - Part 15: Cryptographic information application - Second Edition
 N ISO/IEC 7816-15

Annotation

This part of ISO/IEC 7816 specifies an application in a card. This application contains information on cryptographic functionality. This part of ISO/IEC 7816 defines a common syntax and format for the cryptographic information and mechanisms to share this information whenever appropriate.

The objectives of this part of ISO/IEC 7816 are to

- facilitate interoperability among components running on various platforms (platform neutral),

- enable applications in the outside world to take advantage of products and components from multiple manufacturers (vendor neutral),

- enable the use of advances in technology without rewriting application-level software (application neutral), and

- maintain consistency with existing, related standards while expanding upon them only where necessary and practical.

It supports the following capabilities:

- storage of multiple instances of cryptographic information in a card;

- use of the cryptographic information;

- retrieval of the cryptographic information, a key factor for this is the notion of “Directory Files”, which provides a layer of indirection between objects on the card and the actual format of these objects;

- cross-referencing of the cryptographic information with DOs defined in other parts of ISO/IEC 7816 when appropriate;