Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM Smart Card OS On A 1MB Smart Card

Posted by timothy on from the what-will-your-passport-say-about-you dept.

michaelpapet.com writes "IBM has ported/developed their Javacard smart card operating system for Sharp's 1MB smart card. Read Sharp's announcement here. Interesting features include: AES encryption; elliptical curve encryption; and 1MB of storage. Sharp's smart card package claims to be almost as small as a normal smart card package. In an industry that can considers 64K of memory a luxury, 1MB is staggering. Read Sharp's original 1MB smart card announcement here. Is this a 'Build it and they will come...' kind of solution? How small is an 'almost as small' smart card IC package?"

3 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Storage space by John+Harrison · · Score: 5, Informative
    I work for IBM with smart cards. My team directect Sharp the the JCOP (Java Card Open Platform) operating system over a year ago. The 1MB is rewritable storage. The OS is stored in ROM. It is a simplified version of Java (the JavaCard standard) that requires very little in the way of resources.

    Functionality is added to the card by securely loading JavaCard applets to the 1MB of storage. More info on JCOP can be found here.

    --
    Lasers Controlled Games!
  2. The 20 Year Cycle by Etcetera · · Score: 4, Informative


    20 years ago, Apple was figuring out how to squeeze a graphical operating system into 128K of RAM. Permanent storage that didn't cost 5 figures was in the 400K range.

    In this day of multi-gigabyte OS installs, it's refreshing to see people return to the "lean and mean" OS mentality, even if it's out of necessity. Hell, even 10 years ago, you could still install an entire installation of Mac OS 7.6 on a set of 10-12 floppies.

    Those were the days. Nice to see such "hack"ish talent used again.

    --
    Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
  3. Here is the confusion by GoClick · · Score: 4, Informative

    The confusion here is that the average /.er doesn't know that a SmartCard is not a SmartMedia Card.

    A SmartCard is NOT for holding pictures of your cat. It's primarily for identity verification. See
    SmartCard

    A SmartMedia Card IS for storing pictures of your cat or whatever else you might have. This is the large card that goes in SOME digital cameras. SmartMedia is a trademark of Toshiba. It is a flash memory format Please see
    SmartMedia