IBM has ported/developed their Javacard smart card operating system for Sharp’s 1MB smart card.
IBM Smart Card OS On A 1MB Smart Card
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The operating system is on ROM, so it doesn’t really matter how much space the smart card has
The real question is whether java card applets become that popular or not ? (java will be faster than native code for smart cards as the bottleneck here is loading time, not execution … at least for most programs).
No, it is not. The card has 8Kb of ROM which is reserved for the smartcard management OS. The Javacard data is stored in the flash area.
Flash on smartcards in the form factor used is extremely expensive. Markup is minimal. The device nature is that of a disposable card. 1MB is huge — I don’t expect to see this take off. There’s a reason why most smartcards use < 2Kb (the last batch of 1024byte pin-controlled storage cards I used cost $3 a pop).
On a sidenote, nothing new here. Sun were pushing Javacards for encrypted broadcast services some time back. Didn’t really take off, since there are already a host of available smartcard OSs, and most if not all smartcards are used in non-shared and proprietary environments.
Well, that’s only 1 Mb on a large SmartCard. Let push things a bit further:
http://www.forbes.com/businesswire/feeds/businesswire/2004/11/02/bu…
“There’s a reason why most smartcards use < 2Kb (the last batch of 1024byte pin-controlled storage cards I used cost $3 a pop). ”
This is not so corect. those cards which has less than 2Kb only used as for simple jobs like public phone cards and usually do not even have a dedicated CPU in it.
The real market for the “real” Smart cards are Credit Cards, Celular Phone Sim Cards and HealthCard like government applications. They have at least 16K Flash (usually 32K or more) area, dedicated CPU and security hardware. and most of them are java cards. Circulation is not bad, i guess there are hundreds of millions of java cards around the world.
And yes, 1MB is an immense amount for the smart cards..
Man, imagine 1MB SIM cards, I can export all my contacts from my phone to it, with addressesm multiple numbers, images, and custom tones…droooool
Did you bother to read the point where I noted ‘broadcast services’? Obviously not.
In terms of numbers, phone-, parking meter-, grocery-, and other ‘disposable’-cards with < 16kb ram outstrip anything else. A processor card costs an order of magnitude more than a simple storage smartcard with pin verifier.
I think that Sun Microsystems own Java Card technology is the best! If you want best security I think Sun Microsystems Java Card is answer!!
Did you happen to actually read what the use of the cards are for? They are not for storing images and sounds. That is what USB sticks are for.
The smart cards are for items like biometric info and password storage.
Could anyone explain why there is need for an OS, or software in general, on such a card? My guess would be to store data on it, not code.
Processor cards work on the model that any host system to which they mate is by default untrusted, and many to an extent where the card owner is also untrusted. Hence they run an internal OS that can for example perform authentication, data verification and code execution in secure memory space before passing data out of the card space to the external system space.
Simple storage cards have enough smarts to set the system read-only with pin-controlled access to the write mode. This doesn’t protect data, but at least makes it more or less tamper proof (at the expense that too many failures to authenticate the pin will burn the pin verifier mechanism). You can ofcourse combine successful pin-verification with modification to the data, and then a reset of the write-mode.
You could put a secondary OS on either of these models (or make it the primary OS, with basic ‘bios-like’ constrained OS to bootstrap it), and have that OS run either on the card (some smartcards go so far as to have dual cpus), or in userland on the user’s system. Depends on how the card reader and host OS work, and what the interface is.
I think the point is that he would like to have a 1meg sim card in his GSM cell phone. I am certainly not sticking a USB stick in my cell phone.