• java card
• javacard
• MUSCLE
• muscle card
• musclecard
• smart card
• smart card linux

When we talk about security in reference to a computer system, we talk about all the
facilities and features needed to avoid that unauthorized people are capable to access
to sensitive data. Security is a crucial matter and it is achieve in different way, one
of those is cryptography. Cryptography allows to protect user data as long as the
keys used to crypt data are safe. A means to store in a secure way this information
is constituted by smart card. Of the size of a credit card, they are provided with
compute capabilities and storage facilities. More powerful has been supplied with a
dedicated hardware for cryptographic operations. In the past, development of smart
card based applications, has been hindered by the lack of an open API, and this
lack has been overcome with the efforts of Schlumberger to introduce Java Card.
Despite this, the development process on open platforms was however hindered by the
lack of drivers, specications and documentations typically available for commercial
platforms only. Aims of the MUSCLE card team was to give a way to spread this technology
on open platforms. Today, the MUSCLE card framework is widely used in the open source
community, allowing users to sign document by means of a smart card device. Aims
of this master degree thesis is to overcome some limitation of this framework. After
a brief presentation of Java Card, MUSCLE Card and related concepts, we discuss
the state of the art of the framework, the proposed modication and how these has
been brought.