Introduction
In the last year or so in my current position, I’ve been fortunate enough to have some time to explore and experiment with smart card technology. In particular, I’m talking about smart cards based on the Java Card and Global Platform standards.
I now have a pretty solid understanding the above standards, and at this point, I have even developed some (small) custom Java Card “applets” as well as some changes to the open source “Coolkey” applet that my current organization uses to store its client PKI certificates and (most importantly) secure the associated RSA private keys. Red Hat has even been kind enough to check in some of my (small) changes to their applet.