A Personal Naming and Directory Service

This paper proposes a new approach for the role of smartcards into distributed and mobile service environments. It is based on the naming and directory service architecture. We present a naming and directory service architecture which is based on a new component we named Personal Naming and Directory Service (PNDS), which is embedded on a smartcard. In section two, after a short introduction, we present PNDS concept and list advantages to have it stored on a smartcard. Section three gives an overview and limits of current smartcards applications for mobile users. Section four presents PNDS features more precisely, and shows how it has been integrated into a federated architecture of naming servers (PNDS has been prototyped using a GemXpresso JavaCard platform). To demonstrate the PNDS concept, an example of a PNDS-based application is presented in section five.