This is a tiny bit off pure crypto, but I've been watching and working around smartcards for 20 years, and I think they've been around longer, maybe even a decade longer. I'm posting this to Perry's list, rather than cross posting, mostly because I hate crossposting
On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 16:34 -0500, Alaric Dailey wrote: > Agreed, but until we have the infrastructure to handle smartcards as > credit cards, then it is at least SOME verification the the person using > the card is the person who is supposed to be using the card. Nearly ten years ago, when I was at Cybercash, we worked with Mondex and other smartcard vendors who also said "as soon as we have infrastructure" Something tells me that soon is not gonna happen in what I would call soon. Smartcards (the smart part) were moderately interesting when there was no networking. We've been at ubiquitous networking for many years. While he was at Cybercash, Ellison was awarded US Patent 6,073,237 "Tamper resistant method and apparatus" which is precisely a network based, software only smartcard. >From what I can see, Smartcards are a technology looking for a practical problem to solve.' Is there a real problem that they uniquely solve, sufficient to drive the building of the needed infrastructure? I don't see it, and I'd love to be made smarter. -- Pat Farrell http://www.pfarrell.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
