A smart card based Single Sign-On and password management solution as a browser extension

Abstract

We describe the design and implementation of Web-Login Card, a smart card based Single Sign-On solution that relieves the users from remembering several username and passwords when authenticating themselves to various services on the internet. Due to its tamper-resistant storage for protecting authentication data and other personal information and cryptographic computation capabilities, smart card is an ideal token of choice in our implementation. Our solution is seamlessly integrated into the Firefox browser via a browser extension that allows users to authenticate themselves and easily manage personal information on the card. The browser extension is written using XUL, JavaScript and Java with LiveConnect providing the bridge between JavaScript and Java. javax.smartcardio library is used for the raw communication between the host and the smart card via APDU exchange using T=1 protocol. © 2010 IEEE.