We want to give Status users control over their private keys, and offer them the possibilty to store them in a air-gapped secure device. This kind of control is provided by hardware wallets, however there is no hardware wallet on the market today that integrates with mobile apps, and hardware wallets are quite expensive.
Javacard smartcards are a good platform to solve this issue: their inexpensive, provides very high level of physical security (CC EAL5+), and are contactless (NFC) and thus work with Android apps.
Our goal is to:
- manufacture such a smartcard, called Keycard,
- standardize a protocol 'Keycard API' for integration of clients with smartcards securing access to crypto assets
- propose an open source javacard applet 'Keycard applet'
It has been decided to leave Keycard card upgradeable to allow software upgrade of Keycard during its lifecycle. This has affected our state diagrams and specifications. Sepcifications (see below)have been updated and approvded by the team on wk2 2019.