1. Introduction¶
1.1. Overview¶
WebSCard acts as a universal smartcard proxy.
Ouh! That’s a lot of weird words at once let’s try to make them a bit more kind:
- smartcard
- Those are those plastic pieces with a chip on it everyone has in his wallet, they use to call Banking card for instance.
- proxy
- A proxy allow you to get some content from some place without even needing to get there. That’s what WebSCard enable to you w.r.t smartcards. It allows you to access a smartcard without needing one.
- universal
- WebSCard has been written with expendablity and interopability as one of its first goals. Through it you can access as well as a real smartcard located three block further, or even a piece of software pretending to be your smartcard on the server itself.
1.2. Motivation¶
Servers are powerfull. unfortunately, they don’t play really well with hardware. As we just saw, smartcards are pieces of hardware. it is thus difficult to run some software one those servers that needs them. This is the main reason why WebSCard is born. the second one being the possibility to test some software without actually needing a real smartcard.
1.3. Features¶
- It is session aware.
- It logs everything in a DB
- It can be configured.
- It supports multiple implementations.
- It supports Bonjour
- It supports SOAP