Mechanism for generic purpose SIM card communication and its applications

Mobile applications are increasingly developed thanks to the rapid progress on open mobile operating systems. In such applications, security issues are now becoming critical. To make use of the security capabilities of SIM card, generic purpose SIM access mechanism, e.g. JSR 177, is required. Unfortunately, JSR 177 is not supported by most mobile device. This paper presents a mechanism based on the event driven model of card application toolkit runtime environment (CATRE) to implement the generic purpose SIM access. The mechanism extends the development and deployment of high security mobile applications using SIM card as a security element in mobile devices that do not support JSR 177. Based on the mechanism, several methods are considered and discussed, and some applications in m-commerce, m-government and m-signature are also presented.