How to Load and Run a Java Card Applet on Real Hardware
The walkthrough we kept coming back to was twenty-five years old. We wanted one that reached the reader on our desk. This is our attempt, including the wrong turns.
What this article covers
In part one we covered the why: secure elements, threat models, and why TLS dies on a microamp budget. This part is the how: taking a JavaCard applet from source code to a real card, through every layer that stands in the way.
We build a small applet called CollarMAC. It receives a challenge from the host, computes a MAC over it with an AES key that never leaves the chip, and returns the result. A MAC - a message authentication code - is a short fingerprint that proves you hold a secret key; it has nothing to do with a network MAC address. Simple in concept. The journey to get it running on actual hardware is...
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