Sharp, IBM partner in IC card development

Sharp Corp. and IBM Japan Ltd have collaborated on development of a 1MB flash memory card equipped with IBM's Java card open platform (JCOP), an embedded operating system based on Java (1) technology.

With the collaboration, Sharp has equipped its large-capacity IC card with JCOP31, the latest version of JCOP, IBM's operating system for IC cards. JCOP31 supports various industry standards as well as encryption and authentication functions, including Java Card (2) specifications 2.2, which define a Java platform for IC cards, and GlobalPlatform (3) specifications 2.1.1, an industry standard for multifunctional IC cards. It also supports advanced encryption standard (AES) (4), the U.S. government's next-generation standard encryption scheme, and the Elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) (5), an encryption scheme that can enable users to obtain a high level of security using short key lengths.