Enabling Distributed Corba Access to Smart Card Applications

With the increasing use of the Web as the platform for online e-commerce applications, smart card technology presents an attractive solution for providing security and access control mechanisms for processing online transactions. A user can insert the smart card into a reader attached to a terminal that provides Web access and client-side processing capabilities; the card performs all processing of secured information for the transaction using an embedded chip. Upon completing the transaction, the user removes the card without having transferred any secured data or algorithms to the hosting terminal. Smart card services have not been integrated into the networked environment in the way that other portable computing devices — notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones, and so on — have been. With the growing need for distributed Web applications that support personalized services in a truly secured platform,1 the smart card’s architecture makes it an ideal device for storing an individual’s personal information and service requirements. Designed primarily for identification applications, a smart card operates through a built-in integrated circuit. The programming environment therefore lacks the architectural flexibility to support networked computing applications. Such limitations motivate our design for a distributed computing architecture that uses common object request broker architecture (Corba) wrapping technology to integrate smart card services. The design allows us to exploit Corba’s flexibility to provide a heterogeneous platform and promote rapid application development. Corba provides a distributed object paradigm for smart card application development, and allows us to interoperate with existing and evolving Corba-compliant services. In this article we describe the architecture and implementation of the OrbCard framework, which leverages Corba middleware services to integrate smart card services with the object request broker (Orb) bus.