The Embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card (eUICC) is an
embedded SIM card. It differs from an ordinary (replaceable) SIM card in that
it’s built into mobile, M2M, and IoT devices and cannot be replaced. When such
a device is produced it already contains a smart SIM card (eUICC), containing
no information specific to an MNO or an individual user.
With
eUICC, there is no need to manually install and replace MNO specific SIM cards.
Preparing an eUICC for use is called provisioning and entails downloading a
certain MNO specific file, called a profile, to the eUICC. The profile is a
data structure specified in ASN.1 and encoded in ASN.1 DER (Distinguished
Encoding Rules). Its format is specified in the eUICC Profile Package: Interoperable Format
Technical Specification from the SIMAlliance. ASN.1, an
international standard supporting features such as compact binary encodings,
interoperability, and platform independence, is a perfect choice for the format
of eUICC profile.
eUICC
vendors can use OSS’ ASN-1Step to manually
create eUICC profiles. They would receive provisioning information for a set of
devices from a carrier, enter the information in the Value Editor of ASN-1Step,
and encode to DER in order to create one or more eUICC profiles which can be
transferred to the eUICC of target devices. Profiles can also be viewed or
modified using ASN-1Step.
A
Remote Provisioning System (RSP) allows for remote provisioning of the eUICC
with a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) profile. The RSP also enables the secure,
dynamic changing of profiles.
The OSS ASN.1 Tools can be used
on the network elements of Remote Provisioning Systems to create and parse
profiles. Various interfaces of the RSP nodes exchange profiles (encoded in
ASN.1 DER), for example, the interface ES9+ between the SM-DP+ (Subscription
Manager Data Preparation) and the LPD (Local Profile Download), and the
interface ES11 between the LDS (Local Discovery Service) and the SM-DS
(Subscription Manager Discovery Service). These interfaces can be implemented
using the OSS ASN.1 Tools. The ASN.1 specification used by the RSPs is found in
the GSMA RSP Technical Specification
document. The specification is passed to the ASN.1 compiler to generate
programming language specific structures or classes. The compiler generated
code along with the high performance OSS ASN.1 runtime libraries are used to
create applications for use on the RSP nodes to create and parse profiles.
Visit this link
for more information about the OSS ASN.1 products and to download
a trial. Online documentation for the ASN.1 products can be accessed here.
If you have any questions about using the OSS ASN.1 products in eUICC
applications, please contact info@oss.com.
