Java Smart Card Basic article

Summary:

Starting with this article, we have published a series of articles on smart cards for Java development, which gives you a basic introduction to smart cards. As long as you have a smart card, a card reader, and a set of software that can communicate with smart cards, you can start developing a practical application. This article covers smart card management software that follows the ISO7816 standard, how to read and write memory from smart cards using the Gemplus reader and Gemplus smart cards, and some applications that utilize the storage capabilities of smart cards. Future articles will cover smart cards produced by different manufacturers, and will also cover the standard for smart cards.

As the first article of the series, this article will be mainly for the future discussion to make a foreshadowing work. Here, we will discuss a new standard called Opencard. Future articles will cover secure smart cards and electronic wallets. Finally, we will introduce you to the basic framework structure of smart card software.

Whether it was at the JavaOne conference in April (four lectures on the technology), or at a huge network news station or CNN, the smart card has sparked a firestorm. In this article, we'll show you the real smart card with a practical smart card instance. The technology here will allow you to develop smart card Java applications.

Our discussion focuses on two types of smart cards: storage of smart cards, which can be viewed as a small, read-write disk with an optional security level; A processor card, which can be viewed as a miniature computer with an input and output port. Later articles will be more in-depth introduction of the processor card.

The essence of this article is that we will create a simple prototype for reading and writing smart cards. We're going to talk about a medical prescription card that will save you all the list of prescriptions and check for useful information about insurance, prescription plans, and so on. And we're going to spread around the prescription card.

In this series of articles, you will notice a common theme of accompanying smart cards, which is security issues. The security described here is primarily to prevent illegal access to data by means of excessive insertion of cards or ActiveX components. To this end, the example in this article about reading and writing smart card data will provide you with a secure, consistent, and portable storage.

What is a smart card?

You can think of a smart card as a credit card with a brain. Its brain is a small embedded computer chip. This chip can be programmed to perform a task or store some data, but should always keep in mind: The chip is only small, and its processing power is absolutely not comparable to your desktop computer.

At present, smart cards are only used in industries such as telephony, transportation, banking and health care, but thanks to a large number of developers, we will see smart cards applied to Internet applications in the near future. Smart cards have been widely used in Japan and Europe and have been welcomed in the United States. In fact, the smart card industry in the United States has recently had three significant events:

Pc/sc

Microsoft joined several other companies to launch a smart card application standard called PC/SC, which enables interoperability between personal computers and smart cards on the Win32 platform. PC/SC currently does not support a WIN32 system platform, and perhaps Microsoft will never do that. We will discuss this in detail later.

Opencard Framework

Opencard is an open standard that enables smart card applications to interoperate on platforms such as network computers, POS, desktops, and laptops. Opencard promises to provide 100% pure Java smart card applications. Smart card applications typically do not have the full benefit of pure Java, as they must communicate with peripherals or take advantage of libraries on top of customers. (Of course, without opencard, we can still use 100% of pure Java, but smart card developers need to customize an interface from scratch.) Opencard also provides an interface to PC/SC that enables developers to use devices on existing WIN32 platforms.

Javacard

Javacard was originally proposed by Schlumberger and has now been established as a standard by JavaSoft. Schlumberger currently offers only Java smart cards on the market, and the company is the first vendor to obtain Javacard licenses. As a highly potential dominant smart card standard, Javacard includes standard class libraries and APIs that enable Java applets to run directly above the ISO7816 standard smart card. Javacard provides a secure and chip-independent operating environment for different applications.

Attention:

Although this article focuses on smart card topics, it is more important that you should not be confined to this device. From my point of view, I prefer Dallas semiconductor production of "IButton" equipment. It's like a small, portable credit card, but it's easier to use. Why, then? Because you no longer need to take out a wallet from a few cards to choose the one you want to use, IButton is in your hands. By the right, it's a ring.

Although there are contactless smart cards (see below for information on this), I think it would be profitable for IButton to be a product like jewellery. For more information on IButton, see Resources. By the way, in August at the Java Internet Business Expo (jibe) show in New York, the Java Commerce team demonstrated "javaring."