Smartcards – From Security Tokens to Intelligent Adjuncts

Abstract

Smartcards have traditionally been used as secure tokens in the corporate IT environment – for system logon, remote access, etc. With the increased programmability of smartcards, a new enhanced model of interaction between the smartcard and the corporate computing infrastructure is made possible. We define this new model of interaction as the Intelligent Adjunct model. It enables the use of smartcards to dynamically personalise the environment of the computing terminal and automate user-defined tasks (the terminal can be any computing device with a smartcard reader). In this paper, we describe various usage scenarios of a smartcard as an Intelligent Adjunct (IA) and we consider how such a model can be built using existing smartcards, specifically JavaCards. Various inadequacies of ISO standards are pointed out, an extension of the JavaCard API to support this new model is proposed, and a possible integration into the PC/SC infrastructure is described.