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 […]
Category Archives: Miscellaneous
Mesure and more
Trusted Labs is involved in the Mesure project, whose goal is to develop open benchmarks for Java Card. There are few partners to this project (CNAM, INRIA/POPS, and us), and in particular, no major manufacturer. Yet, the idea is here to start a community that will publish some results. Performance is a sensitive piece information […]
iPhone and iCard
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 […]
The art of Java Card programming
The title may be a bit pompous, but this is one of the sessions that will be offered during the Smart University event, from September 17 to September 20 in Sophia Antipolis (France). The program of this session is very nice, prepared by Pierre Paradinas, and clearly focused on real application development. The first day […]
Open Source or Security through Obscurity ?
I strongly believe that keeping things secret is not a good idea, and that security cannot be achieved through obscurity. There are many convincing examples of this, even in the smart card industry. The infamous GSM algorithms are a perfect example: cryptography using secret algorithms is a bad idea, because the algorithms get broken. Following […]
Can Java Card save the world?
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 […]
Putting a SIM on a mobile PC
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, […]
Adapting the phone to new SIM cards
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 […]
Challenges for the SIM
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 […]
Cards are OK, but is Chip & PIN OK ?
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 […]