[108190] in Cypherpunks
Smart cards in the real world
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Mon Feb 8 10:32:26 1999
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 1999 04:16:14 (NZDT)
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
I just posted the following comments to a private mailing list, I thought it
might be worth forwarding here:
>>Uhh, have you looked at the specs for the Javacard?
>Have you looked at the Mondex specs (Multos?)? How is their concept?
To answer this, I have to give a bit of background info on smart cards.
Firstly, next year will definitely be the year of the smart card. I've been
working with smart cards for about 7 years and people have told me this every
year, so it must be true. I mentioned this to someone who'd been working with
smart cards for about 10 years and he'd been hearing this every year for a
decade. At this point a third person, who'd worked with them for about 15
years and was on some US standards committee which set smart card standards
chimed in and mentioned that they'd been hearing this for 15 years. Before
that, smart cards weren't used much, so I don't think we would have been able
to find anyone who'd been hearing the same thing for 20 years.
Every year there's a new reason why next year will be the year of the smart
card (except for Java, which is so big that it gets two years worth of being
the Next Big Thing). In 1996 it was Mondex. 1997-1998 was Java. In 1999
it's the multi-application smart card.
Anyway, next year will definitely be the year of the smart card.
Peter.
