After over 10 years, e-Smart is changing its name to become the Chip-to-Cloud Security Forum (which will also replace the other conferences from the Smart Event). This looks like a welcome move from card-centered business to application-centered business, reflecting what is happening in the industry. The technology is now ready, and it has not evolved […]
No memory, no chocolate!
There has been some excitement lately about the fact that more and more phones are now getting embedded SE’s (eSE’s), associated to a NFC interface. Some of this excitement came from the ability to manage third-party applications on this embedded SE, as enabled by a whole range of GlobalPlatform specifications, and by the emergence of […]
Best wishes and post-holiday rant
First, since this is my first post of the year, let me wish you all the best for 2012, hoping that it will bring a lot of interesting things around mobile security, Java Card, and all these things. My first post will be a rant about something that is very-much holiday-related for me: package deliveries. […]
Google’s vision of Secure Elements
Google has launched its Google Wallet service, which uses a secure element in the phone to provide some security. Of course, Java card is in every one of these secure elements, but it is not the point today. I have just stumbled upon the Google Wallet page. Initially, I was looking for information about how […]
My first week at Oracle
The break is over! After a month spent on various family activities, I am back to work. My new job is related to the Product Management of Java Card at Oracle. This is at the same time very close to what I did previously (Java Card has been close to the center of my activities […]
Java Card is 15 years old
I just realized that I missed Java Card’s 15th birthday. This birthday was sometime in the end of October, 1996. I don’t have the exact date, because the only document I have is the Java Card API: Specification of the Java Virtual Machine and Application Programmer’s Interface, version 0.13, dated October 10, 1996. Although this […]
The misuse of bytecode verification
Bytecode verification has been an interesting debate since the very beginning of Java Card. Back then, in 1997, Java was very much about Java applets, and the bytecode verifier was the essential piece of software that allowed untrusted code to run in a browser efficiently (i.e., without doing expensive runtime checks, and without having to […]
Visting Gemalto in Gémenos
During the past few months, I have very often visited Gemalto in Gémenos or La Ciotat. I didn’t like it much, since it kept me away from my family. However, although I am very happy right now in Sophia Antipolis and don’t want to move from there, I was born and raised in Marseille, and […]
Hijacking NFC Tags
I have been thinking about tags for as a background task for a while, and one of my directions has been to look at the “hijacking” of tags. Here, I am not talking of replacing some tags by other tags (for instance pushing toward a competitor of a smart poster’s rightfful owner), as thie defnitely […]
Open Source, GlobalPlatform, and Java Card
The two concepts of open source and smart cards have not gone well together. There are some projects about specific applications and corresponding terminal-side software, such as the Muscle project for Linux, and the JMRTD library for e-passports (if you have one that you want me to mention, let me know). However, there are really […]