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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. Storage space by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Interesting features include: AES encryption; elliptical curve encryption; and 1MB of storage.

    Wow, 1MB of storage available on 1MB media, so that's like 0MB for the OS?

    Also, why not start with a larger media? most digital cameras start at at least 16 MB. Something more than 1MB doesn't seem too unreasonable.

  2. Virtual Machine? by Jimmy+The+Leper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Do I have to plug it in and then wait 45 seconds for the java virtual machine to load before it lets me do anything?

    Also, now that it has java, does that mean I can run Project Looking Glass?

    --
    -You're only as clean as your towel.
  3. What is this good for? by bentfork · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Smart cards are a great way to keep you private encryption key(s) and passwords safe, OFF your computer harddrive, and out of your computer memory.

    Why? Because you the user can not know if the computer you are typing on is safe ( think spyware, malware etc... ) .

    Current smartcard technology has been problimatic because you can only store tiny amounts of data on them. By tiny I mean really small, shorter than a few SMS (text based cellphone) message amount of data. ( dont forget the file allocation table takes up space...)

    You also dont really store data on them, they store data for you. Smart cards are basically little computers, that will only respond with the correct password to give you your data. Pretty clever really.

    Now it looks like they will be able to store much more data, like a couple 1024 bit keys, your encrypted passwords and lots of other great stuff like that.

    That is what it could be used for... but I am sure everyone is going to buy them because they can save their IE Favorites, and their Email Address book on it.