Increasing smart card dependability

Open smart cards like Java Card provide application developers an opportunity to develop rapidly applications by offering the possibility to download during post issuance application into the card. The main drawback with this kind of smart cards is the risk to download a hostile application that may exploit a faulty implementation module of the platform. Security is always a big concern for smart cards, but the issue is getting more intense with multi-applicative platforms, post issuance code downloading and the constant growth of the complexity. Allowing post issuance need to verify that the incoming applet respects the semantics of Java byte code. For this purpose a byte code verifier checks the code during load phase. Unfortunately due to the lack of smart card resources this piece of code has not yet been implemented on a smart card.