How to Use ISO/IEC 24727-3 with Arbitrary Smart Cards

The forthcoming ISO/IEC 24727 series of standards defines application programming interfaces for smart cards and is expected to provide a major contribution to the global interoperability of smart cards and card-applications. However it assumes in part 2 [8] that certain information concerning the capabilities of the card and its (cryptographic) applications is stored on the card itself. As already issued smart cards do not provide the required structures, the significance of ISO/IEC 24727 for billions (see [5]) of “legacy cards” seems to be questionable. In order to overcome this problem, the present paper introduces an alternative approach, which does not require any specific information on the card but provides the information which is necessary to map generic requests to card-specific APDUs to the middleware in form of XML-based CardInfo-files.