Design of the next generation smart card wallet system

Abstract

The smart card is playing an important role in electronic commerce, particularly in the area of electronic payments. It is expected that the next generation of smart card will be more intelligent, more interactive and more interoperable (the 3i requirements). The aim of this project is to design a smart card wallet system for fulfilling these 3i requirements. The smart card wallet is multi-functional, such that it can be used to carry electronic coins, electronic identity cards and other electronic items. It can also interact with other devices on the Internet. An object-based framework is proposed to store various electronic items as objects, and some security protocols are presented to ensure that objects can be stored and managed securely, effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, an anonymous offline payment protocol has been developed by enhancing the CAFE payment system. To take into account the memory-limited nature of smart cards, a Lightweight eXtensible Markup Language (LXML) is proposed for storing data in the smart card wallet. The basic idea is to employ special navigation tags instead of normal XML tags in the data files in order to reduce the size of a data file. By using these navigation tags, the data entries in a LXML document can be linked to their respective elements in the document object tree. To utilize the memory of a smart card wallet more efficiently, certain objects can be stored in an Object Server (OS) outside of a smart card. With the aim of minimizing the mean object retrieval time, a dynamic memory management algorithm has been developed to determine which objects should be stored externally by taking into account the available memory and the size and retrieval frequency of each object.