Design and Implementation of a Zero-Knowledge Authentication Framework for Java Card

Zero-knowledge authentication protocols are an alternative to authentication protocols based on public key cryptography. Low processing and memory consumption make them especially suitable for implementation in smart card microprocessors, which are severely limited in processing power and memory space. This paper describes a design and implementation of a software library providing smart card application developers with a reliable authentication mechanism based on well-known zero-knowledge authentication schemes. Java Card is used as the target smart card platform implementation based on the evaluation of the Fiat-Shamir (F-S) and Guillou-Quisquater (G-Q) protocols under various performance criteria are presented to show the effectiveness of the implementation and that G-Q is a more efficient protocol.