New Delhi, Sept. 16: GMA Software Inc. today released a TranSCOS-compliant smart card operating system for the transport sector that will not only help issue driving licences on smart cards but also keep track of the entire transport system across the country.

TranSCOS, an optimised smart card operating system, complies with the Government of India’s SCOSTA (Smart Card Operating System for Transport Applications) requirements.

The SCOSTA has been jointly developed by the National Informatics Centre, ministry of communications and information technology, and the ministry of road transport and highways, who also laid down specifications for it.

TranSCOS’ ISO/IEC 7816 (name of the software) built on GMA’s SCOS kernel, conforms to the SCOSTA specifications and is expected to meet the increasing demand for smart card-based driving licences and vehicle registration certificates being adopted by many states.

“This is an important milestone in the digitalisation of the transport system. It will help in streamlining transport departments all over the country as well as the licensing system. We hope to implement it soon but there are a few issues that need to be sorted out, such as the language and customisation of numbers,” a senior official in the ministry of road transport and highways said.

GMA Software is a Silicon Valley-based company, whose product TranSCOS runs on a variety of smart card controllers from Hitachi, ST Micro, Infineon and Samsung.

A cryptographic library in the system provides a high quality random number generation. Developed in modular format, it helps robust encryption technologies as required by the users. TranSCOS implements a highly compact file system (low memory) while providing fast and predictable access times.

“We started work on this project last August. In March this year, the version 1.2b specifications were released for developing into a product. This document specifies the operating system interface for the multi-purpose smart cards intended to be used in the context of the applications in India,” sources said.

“It covers the interface details of the smart card operating system. However the implementation of the operating system, processor for the smart card and other such details are not covered in this document and are out of its scope. This will be undertaken by the government,” they added.