HOW SMART CARDS CAN BENEFIT FROM OBJECT-ORIENTED TECHNOLOGIES

We submit that a key enabling technology for non-predefined and multi- purpose smart cards is object-oriented technology. Object-oriented con cepts and skills have proved their efficiency to model, design, and im plement information systems made of small components. Smart cards beco me more and more personal environments for multiplicity of services. T herefore, they need to allow downloading of unpredictable services and to be easily integrated into information systems. This paper presents the usage of object-oriented technologies to implement a generic smar t card operating sq!stem and to provide a card object adapter to acces s smart card services from distributed object-oriented information sys tems based on CORBA architecture.