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July 2009 - n°1

10 Years of Java Card™

When was Java Card™ born ?

Officially, in 1996 – when Schlumberger showed its first Cyberflex cards and issued its first Java Card™ 1.0 card. But this specification was very basic and short-lived.

The following year the industry organized into the Java Card Forum. Six months later it issued a new specification, 2.0, which introduced some really important things – such as the applet application model. But it was still an intermediate release.

It took 18 more months to release Java Card™ 2.1 cards – on which Java Card™ 2.2.2 and Java Card™ 3.0 Classic are still based.

This specification was issued in 1999. That same year, the GlobalPlatform consortium was created to define how to manage applications on multi-application cards. We can therefore consider 1999 the birth year of Java Card™ as we know it today.

Ten years on, what is the verdict on Java Card™ ? Has it delivered on its promise ?

Java Card™ has been a huge success : 5.5 billion Java Card™ cards are in use worldwide. Yet not many issuers have deployed applications after card issuance, and there have been very few deployments involving applications from multiple providers.

Different application providers have different business models and different security requirements. These differences are hard to settle, and the actors need a strong incentive to do so. NFC may actually be that incentive.

NFC will only be a success for card issuers if several cards can be dematerialized in the same phone – which implies that applications from several actors must cohabit on the same device.

NFC therefore has the potential to trigger a richer use of Java Card™ technology. And with the new Java Card™ 3.0 framework, which supports Smart Card Web Servers, it becomes possible to define standalone card applications, which include both the business logic and the user interface.

This is the new frontier for the years to come !

Eric Vétillard, CTO Trusted Labs