  Smart cards are widely used along with PayTV receivers to store secret user
keys and to perform security functions to prevent any unauthorized viewing of
PayTV channels. Java Card technology enables programs written in the Java
programming language to run on smart cards. Smart cards represent one of the
smallest computing platforms in use today. The memory configuration of a smart
card are of the order of 4K of RAM, 72K of EEPROM, and 24K of ROM. Using Java
card provides advantages to the industry in terms of ease of coding, faster
time to market and faster upgrades as compared to plain smart cards . Also
different applications like payTV, e-commerce, health-card can easily be
implemented in a single java card as multiple applets corresponding to each
application can coexists in a single java card. But there are security concerns
in java cards and also the performance issues. In this paper, we analyse the
suitability of using Java card for PayTV applications as part of conditional
access system in place of plain smart cards.
