Mobile code as an enabling technology for service-oriented smartcard middleware

Smartcards can be seen as service providing entities that implement a secure, tamper-proof storage and offer computational resources which make them ideally suited for a variety of tasks such as authentication management of personal profiles, and other kinds of secure information processing. Integration of smartcards into networked environments though, has not been achieved yet in a transparent manner. The authors describe the requirements for the design of middleware for smartcards and propose a platform for the execution of mobile code as the core of such middleware. This is in contrast to traditional architectures based on a request-broker scheme that would need huge standardization efforts to be applicable to smartcards. As an instance of such middleware, we describe our implementation which is centered around the mobile code facilities available in Java and the service trading features of Jini.