2023-08-15 –, Milliways
Language: English
During the past few years, many people have started to use virtualized eSIMs instead of the classic physical chip card SIMs. Behind the scenes, a rather complex universe of protocols, interfaces, cryptographic operations, trust models and business processes are in operation to make this work.
However, like many aspects of cellular technology, the knowledge of the technology behind it is not widely understood. - despite its ferquent use by a large user base. This talk aims to change that, as far as possible in a 45minutes introductory talk.
Aspects covered are:
* What is an eSIM?
* The eUICC as physical "trusted chip" inside the phone
* The 3 flavors of eSIM: Consumer, M2M and IoT
* The eSIM cryptographic chain of trust
* The invovled network elements, their purpose, procedures (SM-DP+, SM-SR, LPA/IPA, ...)
The talk is a technical talk, and is held in the expectation is that the audience has some basic understanding of networking, cryptography and SIM card technology.
Harald Welte is a recovering Linux Kernel hacker with a history of hacking and developing (mostly open source) hardware, firmware and system-level software. Working in network protocols ever since the 1990s, he has dedicated the last 15 years of his life to spearheading Free and Open Source software in the domain of cellular networks.
He has worked extensively on implementations of cellular protocol stacks on virtually any interface at any protocol level from 2G to 4G - most of that in the context of the Osmocom project, which he co-started.
You can find more information on the (sadly rather infrequently updated) blog, and the usually more up-to-date fediverse presence at https://chaos.social/@LaF0rge