Web services mobility in a pocket

The infiltration of the Web as the preferred choice for online e-commerce and IT applications has motivated the need to introduce innovative mechanisms to enforce strong security monitoring and control on transactions conducted over a distributed environment. The smart card technology presents an attractive solution for providing strong security and access control mechanisms that are tightly bound and associated to the individual carrying and owning the card. Despite its potential, smart card services have not been integrated into the networked environment in the way other portable computing devices, such as notebooks, PDA, mobile phones, and so on, have been. This has motivated our design for a distributed computing platform for smart card services to operate over a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based on evolving Web services technology. In particular, the paper presents the design of the WSCard (in short for Web services card) architecture and its implementation based on the application of Web services wrapping technology. Importantly, the design allows us to exploit Web services flexibility to provide a heterogeneous and promote rapid integration of smart card services as first class citizens of Web services. With WSCard, existing service-oriented applications can seamlessly interoperate with smart card services by treating the card services as native Web services, while employing established Web services standards - SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.