Applications for Java Card: the good ideas, but also the more peculiar, and the not that successful.
There is a big ongoing debate about the future of the SIM, as illustrated by e-Smart’s debate about “SIM, no SIM , super SIM?”. I don’t have the answer, and as a Java Card expert, I am not sure to really care. It seems that most people agree that it is nice to have at [...]
Over a week after the launch, it is a duty as a blogger to mention the iPhone. I am not going to explain how great it looks and feels, and I am not going to talk about the latest iPhone hacks. In fact, I will react on an old Steve Jobs quote that I saw [...]
Not by itself, but maybe that it can help a little bit. One of the sessions in JavaOne was about the Bekoz payment system, which aims at providing a low-cost alternative to money transfer schemes like Western Union.
The scheme is based on mobile phones, and the client side of the software runs on a Java [...]
As of today, only a minority of people use 3G interfaces on PC’s. In fact, the most avid users I know work for an operator, which greatly lowers the connection cost. Nevertheless, 3G is an interesting way to get basic connectivity on a PC, since it reuses an existing infrastructure.
Still at the SIM Summit, Intel’s [...]
Although major phone manufacturers often are smart card foes, some actors in this field pay great interest to SIM cards. One of them is Purple Labs, which designs specific devices for MNOs. Since their customers like smart cards, they understand their importance.
Jean-Marie André, of Purple Labs, made a presentation at the SIM Summit in Prague. [...]
I have chaired a session at the SIM Summit, whose topic was the technical challenges to be met in order to satisfy operator requirements. The speakers were mixed between operators and vendors. The session was very informative, especially because there seems to be a good convergence between the actors. In order, the hot topics are [...]
A significant part of my job is to evaluate the security of smart cards, in particular in the banking sector. The level of security achieved in today’s card is definitely quite good, and getting a PIN out of a banking smart card remains a very difficult task. Nevertheless, the latest paper of Cambridge’s research lab [...]
The DRM world, at least for its music part, is shaking on its grounds, with today’s memo from Steve Jobs. Jobs argues in there that music sold on Internet should be DRM-free, and his main argument is interesting: record companies are selling 90% of their music on DRM-free CD’s, so why bother protecting the rest? [...]
I stepped into an article that outlines a great use of contactless payment technology. The idea is here to order drinks from an interactive table, and to use a contactless card to pay for them; it has been implemented in a bar in an English college. This does not look very interesting, until we ask [...]
Bruce Shneier has pointed to another article on the security of e-passports. This one focuses on cloning, but contrarily to a previous article, which simply mentioned that cloning was possible (which is natural, since nothing is done to avoid it), the authors now look for ways to actually exploit the cloned passports. The ideas are [...]
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