Issues in Smartcard Middleware 

Roger Kehr, Michael Rohs, Harald Vogt 

Abstract 

One of the main obstacles to the unification of smartcard usage is the lack 
of a standardized way of exhibiting a smartcard's interface to the outside 
world. Since the environments smartcards are working in are generally equipped 
with more computing resources than smartcards themselves, the key to 
interoperability could lie within more sophisticated, generally applicable 
techniques that help to discover card services and to grant access to them. 
The JiniCard framework, which is briefly described in this paper, was 
developed as a prototypical infrastructure with this idea in mind. 

We identify four key areas, which need to be taken into account by middleware 
that aims for the interoperability of smartcards. These are spontaneous 
integration into environments, transparent usage of card services, remote 
access to card services, and security that is effectively controllable and 
observable by the card's owner.