J2ME provides JSR 177 which has APIs to access the SIM as a smart card. I want to explore this more and see what all I can do with this, but, I cant find any documentation with respect to that. All documentation that I have found so far is very generic and only mentions how to access a smart card with the APDU APIs and not how I can use this to do anything on the SIM.
Any ideas on where to get started?
Mostly, JSR 177 is supposed to be used to extract the certificate that is on the SIM so you can encrypt/decrypt/sign data in a way that your MNO likes.
The difficulty in finding documentation comes from so few handset manufacturers having included a full JSR177 implementation in their phone.
That, in turn, presumably comes from the huge amount of external, security-related specs to read and understand before the JSR177 spec itself makes sense if you're not a cryptography protocols expert.
The TCK sources and supplemental Symbian/Nokia test code would be a good place to look but, unfortunately, none of that has been open-sourced yet.
Common commands like changing the SIM PIN code basically require an understanding of the binary protocol itself. Simply appending the correct sequence of bytes to an APDU GCF url will get it executed if the JSR177 implementation itself is correct.
If you have only looked at the Sun JavaME SDK, you should probably have a look at the APDU MIDlet example in the latest Series60 SDK and added documentation in Nokia's Java Developer's Library. You can find both of them at