Is the Performance of Smart Card Cryptographic Functions the Real Bottleneck?

It is generally believed that among the major delaying factors of smart card performance is the speed of the cryptographic algorithms. This is only partially true, as a number of other factors that add substantial delays to the overall performance of a smart card application should also be taken into account. In this paper we analyse the significance of these delaying factors. Furthermore, we also present some performance measurements of the two most widely used terminal application programming interfaces (APIs) and Java Cards. The aim of this work is to emphasise, both to smart card application developers and smart card technology researchers, the importance of these delaying factors and also to provide a reference point as to the performance of each API.