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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

Page 3 of 7

Create a development environment for building smart card apps

In order to develop smart card applications, you need a few things, namely: a smart card reader; software to communicate with the reader as well as some software to communicate with the card that has been plugged into the reader; and, of course, smart cards and smart-card hardware.

Smart card reader
To communicate with a smart card or develop an application that is smart-card capable, you must have a reader. The reader provides a path for your application to send and receive commands from the card. There are many types of readers on the market, the most prevalent being the serial, PCCard, and keyboard models. (Keyboard models pop up here and there; expect them to be directly available from the large PC makers by June 1998.)

This article uses serial readers to support the devices. A serial reader connects to a computer's serial port. Note that the code provided also supports a PCCard reader; most laptops come with PCCard slots built in.

Each manufacturer provides a different protocol for speaking to a reader. Once you can communicate with the reader, there is one protocol for communicating with a smart card: Communication with a smart card is based on the APDU format. (The APDU format is discussed below.) For information on purchasing your own reader, see the "Gemplus smart card readers" heading in the Resources section.

Software for communicating with the reader
A number of object-oriented classes are needed for the smart card example included in this article. These are:

• ISO command classes for communicating with 7816 protocol
• Classes for communicating with the reader
• Classes for converting data to a manufacturer-specific format
• An application for testing and using the cards for the purpose for which the application was designed

Smart cards and smart card hardware
As noted at the beginning of the article, in order to develop the smart card application here, you need smart card hardware and some smart cards. You can purchase smart card development kits from a number of companies, including Gemplus and Schlumberger.

For those of you who already have readers, you should be able to use your reader by supplying an implementation of an interface class that we will discuss later. As mentioned above, before we can communicate with the card, we must be able to communicate with the reader, and just as there are many different cards, there are many different readers.

Important smart card standards

An important piece of the smart card application development puzzle is the standard protocols. Basically, the application communicates with the reader, which in turn talks to the smart card using a standards protocol -- in our case, the International Standards Organization (ISO) 7816 protocol.

As with any new technology, there are so many standards for smart cards that you may find yourself discouraged and overwhelmed. Achieving a basic understanding of the following standards will enable you to develop applications with the confidence that you are not ignoring something basic to using smart cards. For some systems, however, special standards come into play. I have broken the whole standards thing down into "horizontal" and "vertical" standards: Horizontal standards can be used by all applications, while vertical standards are specific to a system.

 

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