Section: Software

Introduction

In our research domain, developing software prototypes is mandatory to validate research solutions and is an important vector for publications, demonstrations at conferences and exhibitions as well as for cooperations with industry. This prototyping task is however difficult because it requires specialized hardware platforms (e.g., new generations of smart tokens), themselves sometimes at an early stage of development.

For a decade, we have developed successive prototypes addressing different application domains, introducing different technical challenges and relying on different hardware platforms. PicoDBMS was our first attempt to design a full-fledged DBMS embedded in a smart card [9] [27] . Chip-Secured Data Access (C-SDA) embedded a reduced SQL query engine and access right controller in a secure chip and acted as an incorruptible mediator between a client and an untrusted server hosting encrypted data [33] . Chip-Secured XML Access (C-SXA) was an XML-based access rights controller embedded in a smart card [8] . Prototypes of C-SXA have been the recipient of the e-gate open 2004 Silver Award and SIMagine 2005 Gold award, two renowned international software contests. The next subsections details the two prototypes we are focusing on today.