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? […]
Category Archives: Miscellaneous
JC101-4C: A basic password manager
UPDATED (07/01/08): Fixed compilation bugs. UPDATED (20/12/11): Fixed the “public” thing. In this first installment, we will focus on the data structure that will contain the sensitive data, as well as the identifiers. We’ll first look at the basic design, and then we’ll consider the implementation.
The Java Card Forum is 10 years old
The Java Card Forum was officially founded 10 years ago (in February 1997), and its initial members were Schlumberger, Gemplus, and Bull CP8. This creation was a formal move, since the first meeting only happened 2 months later. Nevertheless, this first move started the work on Java Card in all three companies, and also showed […]
Small details
Every time that a Java Card specification comes out, I like to think that it is a good specification, and in particular that it provides complete information for developers. We have tried hard, but the completeness remains hard to reach. Not that the spec is bad, which is not true. The Java Card Forum has […]
Contactless beer
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 […]
Cloning e-passports
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 […]
FIDIS study on passports
As mentioned by Bruce Schneier, FIDIS, a network of excellence on identification systems, has published the Budapest Declaration that lists security issues with the current electronic passport schemes. This is a very interesting read, as it outlines many potential issues. One of them is related to the “victim identification” threat that interests me. Since the […]
JC101-3C: A real application
The previous application, the counter, is interesting because we can make it evolve into some kind of an electronic purse, i.e., a real-life application. This is very nice, but the problem with this kind of real-life application (a payment application) is rather useless if you are not (at least) a bank. I therefore decide to […]
JC101-2C: A simple counter (for smart card developers)
UPDATED (05/05/07): Fixed some bugs in the code. UPDATED (22/12/11): Fixed more bugs in the code. The Hello World program is a first program, but it doesn’t do anything interesting. The next step is to have a program that actually does something simple. We will here manage a simple counter with the following operations: Get […]
There could be millions of Java Card applications
The Java Card platform is the most widely used application platform in the world, with around 2 billion cards deployed. However, it remains very different from the other platforms such as Windows or even MIDP. However, for interoperability reasons, most applications are heavily standardized (for instance in the banking and identity markets), which reduces even […]