Distributed Object Programming Environment for Smart Card Application Development

Corresponding Email: [email protected] Abstract Despite the potential of smart card as a key technology to be used as a service-providing device that is truly portable and programmable, it has not received much attention, other than the handful applications that are already being successfully employed in domain-specific areas. In particular, smart card technology operating over a distributed and networked environment such as the Internet, provides unique opportunity to create new classes of distributed applications that are able to seamlessly integrate the pocket portability of smart card services. This paper examines the important challenges of extending the smart card processing architecture to support distributed computing paradigm. After highlighting the issues and possible approaches to achieving this objective, we propose the ORBCard framework. The framework extends CORBA middleware services of providing distributed computing platform to developing smart card applications. The framework is based on using a proxy server that facilitates bridging services between the ORB bus communications and interacting with the smart card's applet using native APDU commands. In particular, we developed the ORBCard compiler that automates the generation of the client stubs and proxy classes using IDL as the baseline interface description language. The initial implementation of the framework has demonstrated the feasibility and validity of the concept in providing a distributed programming environment for smart card applications based on CORBA infrastructure.