Middleware for Smart Cards 

Chapter 16 of the book "Middleware for Communications", John Wiley & Sons 
2004 


Harald Vogt*, Michael Rohs*, Roger Kilian-Kehr+ * Swiss Federal Institute of 
Technology (ETH Zurich) + SAP Corporate Research 


Abstract 

Smart cards are credit card-sized plastic cards with an integrated 
microcontroller chip. This chip is protected against physical and logical 
tampering, thus unauthorized access to internal data structures is virtually 
impossible. This makes a smart card an excellent device for storing secret 
cryptographic keys and other sensitive data. In practice, smart cards are used 
for applications like digitally signing documents, ticketing, controlling 
access to desktop computers, and authenticating the users of mobile phone 
networks. 

The need for middleware and system support became immediately clear when 
smart cards started to gain ground on the common computing platforms. 
Application developers cannot be expected to deal with the large number of 
different, manufacturer-dependent interfaces that are offered by smart card 
readers and smart card services. Therefore, smart card middleware is necessary 
for mediating between these services and application software. In such a 
system, it should be possible to replace one type of smart card with another 
one offering similar features, without affecting the application level. The 
major requirements to smart card middleware are therefore encapsulation of 
communication specifics, interoperability, and system integration. 

In this chapter, we present an overview of the existing approaches to smart 
card middleware. Some of them were inspired by the development of powerful 
microprocessors for smart cards that made it possible to run a Java 
interpreter. Generally, the availability of the Java programming language for 
smart cards increased their popularity and made lots of new applications 
possible. As we will see later in the chapter, this also made it easier to 
integrate them into distributed computing environments. This shows that, with 
the right kind of middleware, the power of smart cards can be effectively 
utilized.