Smart cards and remote computing: Interaction or convergence?

Computing power is largely becoming a basic supply which you can envisage to buy from a provider like you buy power or water. This is the result of a now long running trend that consists in connecting computing resources together so as to set up what can globally be referred to as a remote computing platform, the most up-to-date incarnation of which is the notion of a grid (Foster and Kesselman, 2003). These resources can then be shared among users, what means circulating codes and the results of their execution over a network, what is highly insecure. At the other end of the spectrum of computing devices, smart cards (Mayes and Markantonakis, 2008, Hendry, 2001) offer extremely secure but extremely limited computing capabilities. The question is thus to bridge the gap between computational power and high security. The aim of this paper is to show how large and high capacity remote computing architectures can interact with smart cards, which certainly are the most widely deployed, still the smallest computing systems of the information technology era, so as to improve the overall security of a global infrastructure.