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Service client's use different web services to provide different services. The clients could be platforms ranging from PDAs, laptops to servers. The clients could also be any kind of I/O terminal. Some web service platforms, such as Microsoft.NET, therefore supports the ability to detect the user platforms and generate best content for them.
However, there has been little attempt to use Smartcards as one of such platforms. Smartcards are mostly used to authenticate users but can now perform more functions than that. Though limited in speed and space, chips contain microprocessors, ROM and memory and run their own COS(Chip Operating System), on which various applications may execute. Hence, with this computing power, it may be possible to use Smartcards as mobile access points to web services; Smartcards can store user information, invoke web services and process temporary service results.
In this project we will look at using Smartcards as a vehicle for providing ubiquitous computing. Users, in this model, should be able to access web services from any place with their Smartcards. Furthermore, users do not require any high performance computing mobile devices such as PDA's. We provide a logical model of information sharing and communication between web service, consumer devices and users. We will then provide a full specification of how the different components should be built.
The goal of the project is to provide a comprehensive specification for a communication module which can be attached to any kind of device - ranging for photocopiers to vending machines to exercise bikes which want to access webservices. The communication module does 3 way communication - it talks to a smartcard reader, it talks to a webservice and it is connected to a computation device. The communication module and the device it is connected to are fixed. The ubiquity comes from being able to access any of these anywhere. And to be able to use a single smart card to access various kinds of these devices.
Smartcards have also been doubling their memory size and chip operation clock speed every year since they were introduced in 1996 -- when the chip speed was only 3MHz with 4kbytes of memory. They now operate at 50MHz with 512Kbytes of memory and are expected to run at 400MHz with 100MBytes of memory by 2006. It is also expected that more devices such as fingerprint recognizers, small display devices, and film batteries, will show up on the card. USB based smartcard like applications exist. They provide a USB interface and allow for smartcard like storage. These are typically accessed using a personal computer through the USB port running drivers and special software.
http://www.acismartcard.com/products/products.asp
http://www.thinkmobile.com/Resource/Top/Smartcards/Solution_Providers/
The third page contains has many URLs to various Smartcard product web sites, and most of their products are related to Banking, Financing, Simple Important Data Storage, E-Payment, Health Service, Secure User Authentication, Transportation etc.
The novel ideas we hope to come up with are:
Javacards is one alternative for progamming. These can be programmed with java byte codes instead of assembly. They run a stripped down JVM and JRE (runtime environment). Sun provides a development toolkit.
The specification is the first one to use smartcards for doing ubiquitous computing and should be attrative to smart card companies!
Step by step instructions on compiling and loading the cardlet into the smart card.