Ever since reading the book “Kryptographie und IT-Sicherheit” where I first learned about how SmartCards work, I wanted to do some SmartCard programming. In the book it describes some inner workings of Smart Cards, and that some of them have a small Java VM inside. But it turned out that the entry was not as easy as in many other fields. First of all, you have many smart cards (SIM of your mobild phone, Credit Card, Debit Card, Health insurance card, …), but usually they are protected so you can’t install anything of your own. Technically, it would be possible to have many applications on the same card, like CreditCard, DebitCard, HealthInsurance, PublicTransport, and so on. But with very few exceptions, the issuers don’t feel confortable sharing a card with someone else. Then there seem to be many different standards, and the companies seem to bee keen to obscure as much as they can. And then you also need kind of specialized hardware, but that’s the easier part.