Dinesh,
Re: Smart Cards - Smart Card readers - PC/SC - PKI - Amex "Blue" Card - eSecurity - eBusiness
<< AmEx ... worth watching - particularly the PC card reader ... hooking up a card reader to home PC is rather dinosaurous >>
You have indeed focused on an issue that affects the proliferation of smart cards.
Smart Cards will be in full tornado mode when readers are ubiquitous. This is a classic infrastructure and standards issue that affects any discontinuous innovation in its traverse through the technology adoption life cycle.
Smart Cards are a discontinuous innovation (see the revised "Chasm" pages 83 to 85). They have crossed the chasm on all continents except the Americas and are being adopted in huge numbers worldwide.
The four major current application areas for smart cards are:
1. Prepaid calling cards for pay phones.
2. Subscriber Identification and Authentication (SIM Cards) for mobile wireless telephony.
3. Authentication, entitlements, and privileges for conditional access providers of Pay TV.
4. Financial Transactions (Credit, Debit, Electronic Purse).
The major emerging applications for smart cards are:
1. Rapid Transit (contactless or contact/contactless "dual interface")
2. Physical and logical Access (authentication to a building, a network, the Internet, or a corporate database). This is the potential "Killer App" area of eSecurity and smart cards are the logical portable token that will store keys, certificates, and other credentials in the emerging world of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which in itself is a discontinuous innovation.
The good news is that standards in each of the application arenas are pretty well set and readers and the chipsets that control them are very inexpensive.
* Most pay phones (internationally) have a smart card reader or reader option. Readers are available for vending machines, parking meters, commercial appliances and other application areas for stored value disposable or reloadable serial memory cards.
* Over 50% of the mobile wireless handsets in the world have readers for microprocessor smart cards built in. Handsets are now delivering with a second slot for a "branded" smart card for transaction processing. In 3rd Generation wireless all phones will have at least one smart card reader it appears.
* All set top box manufacturers provide boxes with one (or more) smart card readers.
* POS terminals with smart card readers are available from all of the major terminal manufacturers and the same applies to ATM's
* Readers are integrated into turnstiles for all the major rapid transit procurements taking place in the world.
This leads us to the desktop (and laptop) PC world which is what Amex is beginning to exploit with the Blue Card using initially a serial port reader (supplied by Gemplus). Assuming a port is available and there is no contention for it a user can use the card for eBusiness on his own (or anothers) PC. Port availability and contention are issues and Amex will need to face them. They are an early adopter in the PKI, eSecurity, eBusiness arena. Presumably USB readers will follow as an Amex option as will PCIA readers for laptops. These devices are available today but not widely proliferated, but the major laptop manufacturers all have a smart card reader option.
Eventually we will see readers built into keyboards, disk drives, or the PC desktop or laptop chassis. Windows 2000 is highly smart card enabled and Sun is promoting smart cards heavily as well (JavaCard).
As for standards PC/SC Workgroup has defined PC/SC specifications to ensure that smart cards, smart card readers, and computers made by different manufacturers will work together. Microsoft currently has an approval program, for Windows operating platforms which certifies that products are PC/SC compatible. OpenCard Framework (OCF) is similar to PC/SC for Java Platforms.
I am of the opinion that smart card readers will be as commonplace as CDROM drives now are on computing platforms and when that happens the multiple application smart card smart card tornado will be in full force.
You will know smart cards have truly arrived when you see chips as standard issue in Amex "Green" and Amex "Gold".
BTW: the links in my profile lead to popular smart card sites and their is a Smart Card thread here on SI.
- Eric - |
