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Smart cards: A primer

Develop on the Java platform of the future

By Rinaldo Di Giorgio, JavaWorld.com, 12/01/97

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Smart cards have been getting a lot of buzz lately on the Web, at the JavaOne conference last April (four sessions dealt with the technology), on the big network news stations, and on CNN. In this article we'll bring the smart card to life with a real-world smart-card example. The techniques presented here will allow you to start building Java applications that are smart-card enabled.

We'll focus on two types of smart cards: memory smart cards, which can be viewed as minuscule removable read/write disks with optional security; and processor cards, which can be viewed as miniature computers with an input and output port. Future articles will cover processor cards in greater depth.

As the meat of the article, we'll develop a simple prototype for reading and writing data to a smart card. We will discuss a drug prescription card, which keeps a list of all your prescriptions and tracks your insurance, prescription plans, and other useful info. Later articles will expand on the idea of the prescription card.

You'll notice that a recurrent theme that runs throughout this series on smart cards is the need for a security framework to prevent rogue plug-ins, ActiveX components, and so on from getting at your personal and/or corporate info-goodies. To this end, the demonstration of how to read and write data to a smart card included in this article will provide you with persistent, secure (and portable) storage.

What is a smart card?

You can think of the smart card as a "credit card" with a "brain" on it, the brain being a small embedded computer chip. This card-computer can be programmed to perform tasks and store information, but note that the brain is little -- meaning that the smart card's power falls far short of your desktop computer.

Smart cards currently are used in telephone, transportation, banking, and healthcare transactions, and soon -- thanks to developers like you -- we'll begin to see them used in Internet applications. Smart cards are already being used extensively in Japan and Europe and are gaining popularity in the U.S. In fact, three significant events have occurred recently in the smart card industry in this country:

PC/SC
Microsoft and several other companies introduced PC/SC, a smart card application interface for communicating with smart cards from Win32-based platforms for personal computers. PC/SC does not currently support non-Win32-based systems and may never do so. We will discuss this in greater detail later on.

OpenCard Framework
OpenCard is an open standard that provides inter-operability of smart card applications across NCs, POS, desktops, laptops, set tops, and so on. OpenCard promises to provide 100% pure Java smart card applications. Smart card applications often are not pure because they communicate with an external device and/or use libraries on the client. (As a side note, 100% pure applications could exist without OpenCard, but without it, developers would be using home-grown interfaces to smart cards.) OpenCard also provides developers with an interface to PC/SC for use of existing devices on Win32 platfroms.

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