Extended Secure Memory for a Java Card in the Context of the Java Card Grid project

The Java Card Grid platform is a project carried out at LaBRI, Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique. It consists in setting up a platform composed of a large number of smart cards connected together by USB hubs and driven by PCs. The Java Card readers are assembled in a wall mount rack and are organized in a cluster-like architecture. The goal of the Java Card Grid project is to provide a hardware and software environment to experiment on security demanding applications and thereafter to propose innovative high level security solutions for distributed applications. This original Java Card Grid can be seen as a proof of concept (even if it is much more than that and can be used as is). Other platforms based on it are now being investigated among which: – a network based Java Card Grid that uses cards available at various sites on the network; – a mobile Java Card Grid [1] that uses a multilevel approach that combines ad hoc communication between mobile phones and the use of the GSM network. The smart cards are very efficient at insuring security. Unfortunately, the main handicap of a smart card remains its limited resources. This restriction principally affects the memory size and the processor speed. Regarding memory, even if it has grown significantly in the recent years, it is still too limited to run real life complex applications. In this paper we propose a solution that makes it possible to provide a smart card with a large storage capacity, still insuring a high level of security. We show how this offcard storage solution will be useful to support real size applications on our Java Card Grid.