-- The biggest application of smart cards that I know of are anonymous phone minutes. In Australia, I walked into a hardware store in the middle of the back of beyond, and asked the sales kid about a cellular phone for someone who would not be in Australia very long. He promptly urged me to buy a phone that uses one of these cards, pointing out as one of the advantages that I buy the minutes for cash, and that no one would know who was associated with the number, other than those that I wished to know. This guy was a random saleskid in the backblocks of Australia, not a noted cypherpunk poster. Increasingly however, we see smartcard interfaces sold for PCs. What for, I wonder? In general, a smartcard and a PC smartcard interface can be used anywhere where one would use a password, providing greater security and ease of use than mere passwords. By and large, people only care about greater security when the password is protecting money, considerable lumps of money. A huge number of web pages are selling smart card readers for PCs, for example: http://www.drivecrypt.com/dcplus.html Obviously end users are buying this stuff. What are they buying smartcard readers for? So I did a google search for web pages selling "chipdrive extern" (the most popular smartcard interface for PCs) Seems like this is big business -- that huge numbers of these widgets are made and sold. yet most of the web pages seemed curiously vague as to what anyone was buying them for. I clicked on a link that said "current smart card industry news" -- the page was empty. I found another page that advertised : : "The Key to Secure eCommerce" : : : : The eCode solution provides secure remote : : identification and digital signatures for : : e-banking, telephone and mobile banking and other : : application where secure identification is needed. : : : : The eCode system offers user authentication, user : : authorisation, data integrity, data : : confidentiality and non-repudiation. A related web page says : : Argos Mini is a cost-efficient smart card reader for : : the mass market and applications like Internet : : Banking, Telecommuting, Access Control, loading : : Electronic Purse, etc. So we are seeing lots of publicity from people selling smart cards readers but curiously little from those applying them to particular purposes. Mondex, as far as I know, sank with very little trace. They seem to have given up attempting to issue electronic money based on smartcards, and instead have become just another company selling smart card readers and software, their biggest contribution being a smartcard operating system that should allow multiple applications to use the same smartcard, so that a smartcard can act both as a purse and keyring, carrying keys to many different things. This seems to imply that so many diverse people are finding uses to for smartcard enabled PCs that one is likely to use a smartcard to interact with security from many independent vendors, just as one is likely to have a lot of unrelated keys on one's keyring. If this is so big, and it does seem to be big, how come I do not know of any applications? The multiplicity of smartcard interface vendors, and the struggle over the problem of using a single smartcard for multiple unrelated purposes, suggests a multitude of widely used purposes, yet I have no purposes. Huge numbers of people must be buying these things, often for multiple independent reasons, yet what are those reasons? What would that kid in Australia buy one of these things for? --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ynBJMlsLDPzg07sL/LvEpB/tIW037sE6ghIofneK 4PVvvjR5R/LHANHsZwHICLtrUdTredEP7JMGYF3vh