Developing smart card applications using the OpenCard Framework

Smart cards provide a compact, secure, and widely used method for identifying ourselves and authenticating our transactions. With their increasing incorporation into credit cards and the cellular industries move toward smart card based GSM networks, they are positioned to become truly pervasive. Unfortunately, until now, teaching smart card development required expensive, specialized hardware and software as well as detailed, and usually proprietary, knowledge of the hardware and operating system of a given brand of smart card. The introduction of Java programmable smart cards along with recent advances in smart card simulators enables educators to leverage their students existing Java skills and begin teaching smart card development today. We present a tutorial on using the Java based OpenCard Framework to communicate with smart cards.