Java Card for PayTv Application

Smart cards are widely used along with PayTV receivers to store secret user keys and to perform security functions to prevent any unauthorized viewing of PayTV channels. Java Card technology enables programs written in the Java programming language to run on smart cards. Smart cards represent one of the smallest computing platforms in use today. The memory configuration of a smart card are of the order of 4K of RAM, 72K of EEPROM, and 24K of ROM. Using Java card provides advantages to the industry in terms of ease of coding, faster time to market and faster upgrades as compared to plain smart cards . Also different applications like payTV, e-commerce, health-card can easily be implemented in a single java card as multiple applets corresponding to each application can coexists in a single java card. But there are security concerns in java cards and also the performance issues. In this paper, we analyse the suitability of using Java card for PayTV applications as part of conditional access system in place of plain smart cards.