[Work done from 20th October to 2nd November 2008]
For the last two week period I was working with Java card technology, which was not so familiar already. So I had to refer to many web resources to learn the basic concepts and programming techniques. The website belong to Sun microsystems on Javacard Technology was really helpful in finding the necessary information. I supposed to use the Javacard development kit (v 2.2.2) together with Apache ant for creating ant builds. Many information available on the web is mainly useful in credit card sort of programming problems, and I had to extract the useful information out of that and use in our eID domain.
Through continuous reading I found that we need to use applets in Javacard to implement additional functionalities. So I started writing the applet to be used in the eID smart card. Many of the functionalities are implemented and some additional functions have to be implemented after the completion of other components of the overall system, because those functions have to be called by those particular components and presently I don’t have enough information and specifications to implement them. Mainly because there is a desktop application which accesses the card also interacts with eID authentication Webservice. I need the policy and the message exchange formats to complete that part. But that is not such hard work compare to other components of the system.
Presently this implementation is only in Java Development Kit’s JCRE (Java Card Runtime Environment) and as soon as we get the actual Java Card we will implement this to that. We are making arrangements to buy a Java Card with card reader or USB Java Card. We are going to have two deliverables as the eID container. One will be smart card based and another one will be our own read only USB stick. The second option was suggested by our superviser and we are trying to build our own stick(We are not going to create electronic circuits, but going to make them read-only).
We had two meetings with our project superviser Dr.Chandana Gamage, in which we discussed several issues in the application development. Some of the architecture components had to be changed. So, We redesigned the architecture, discussed that with the superviser and confirmed that. We were adviced to have regular meetings with him to update the project progress.