Middleware for Smart Cards

Smart cards are credit card-sized plastic cards with an integrated microcontroller chip. This chip is protected against physical and logical tampering, thus unauthorized access to internal data structures is virtually impossible. This makes a smart card an excellent device for storing secret cryptographic keys and other sensitive data. In practice, smart cards are used for applications like digitally signing documents, ticketing, controlling access to desktop computers, and authenticating the users of mobile phone networks. Sometimes, smart card functionality is provided by other appliances such as USB “crypto tokens”, rings, or the GSM SIM (subscriber identity module). Although these devices look differently, they technically just differ in the interface to the host they connect to, thus we will treat them as smart cards as well.