Open Source Card Projects

Not surprisingly many of the smart card projects I am getting involved those days are using Open Source technologies.

Nothing really new there, but I do appreciate a note of irony there since the smart card space is traditionally quite protective if not secretive, with a lot of decisions happening in small committees behind close doors and protected by patents and various obfuscation mechanisms.

Back to the subject, those in the know will argue that the above-mentioned Open Source technologies are not smart card related. That’s true, they mainly come from well-established communities such as Apache (http://www.apache.org/) or ObjectWeb (http://www.objectweb.org/) and the focus is on providing middleware infrastructure components.

So this raises the question what about smart card and open source?

Some of you will remember the defunct opencard framework (OCF, now hosted on opencard.sourceforge.net). OCF was a very useful framework and the book Smart Card Application Development Using Java (by Uwe Hansmann, Martin S. Nicklous, Thomas Schäck and Frank Seliger) did at that time a lot for the multi-application cases. Alas, it wasn’t enough and about 5 years ago, opencard dissolved.

So I decided to have a browse around to see what’s the state of play here today. So what I found is as follow, and I thought I may as well share it with you. No offence meant, if I have omitted someone, in such a case best is to post the group. So we will all know you are alive and kicking!

OpenSC http://www.opensc-project.org/. The original intend was to provide library and applications for PKCS #15 compatible cards. They now host a number of open source projects, again related to PKCS#15 and cryptographic (PKCS#11) and authentication (PAM) services.

M.U.S.C.L.E. http://www.linuxnet.com/. Their intend is to provide cross-platform and cryptographic support. The pcsc-driver for linux and the jpcsc.dll are widely used.

OpenSCDP http://www.openscdp.org/. Impressive effort to provide tools to facilitate development of smart card application using GlobalPlatform Profile and Scripting by the Open Smart Card Development Platform project.

Then there is smaller number of projects hosted on sourceforge but only a few that have significant activity and download statistics:
EclipseJCDE - an eclipse plug-in to facilitate javacard development using Sun's JCDK
GlobalPlatform - a tool to add/remove applications on a GlobalPlatform card.
Javacard proxy – a proxy for Sun’s apdutool
Jaccal - a set of Java APIs used to interface with smart cards using scripts.
Java Sign – a utility to sign and verify document
So I got curious when I read the announcement that NLnet will fund an open-source project by the Radboud University to design smart card software that would offer stronger protection of personal data for public transport card. Should governments do more? I wonder if openforum Europe has anyhting to say on that one. Well for now I wonder if is this a sign a of rejuvenated activity in the open source smart card projects space.