Mobile Code as an Enabling Technology for Service-oriented Smartcard 
Middleware 

Roger Kehr, Michael Rohs, Harald Vogt 

Abstract 

Smartcards can be seen as service providing entities that implement a secure, 
tamper-proof storage and offer computational resources which make them ideally 
suited for a variety of tasks such as authentication, management of personal 
profiles, and other kinds of secure information processing. Integration of 
smartcards into networked environments though, has not been achieved yet in a 
transparent manner. In this paper we describe the requirements for the design 
a middleware for smartcards and propose a platform for execution of mobile 
code as the core of such middleware. This is in contrast to traditional 
architectures based on a requestbroker scheme that would need huge 
standardization efforts to be applicable to smartcards. As an instance of such 
middleware, we describe our implementation which is centered around the mobile 
code facilities available in Java and the service trading features of Jini.