On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 07:12:47PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
"James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> writes:
Increasingly however, we see smartcard interfaces sold for PCs. What for, I wonder?
A previous company I worked for made a secure smart-card reader chip/system that used smart cards to carry a user's private key and cert. The initial application was the SET electronic payment protocol. (all together now: yuck!) SET didn't take off, and not many of these were sold. Amex hyped up their 'blue' card & was giving out free readers for a while... until they discovered that the drivers were fatally broken (ha ha, it was done by a competitor of the company above, their product was shite). That, plus the fact that Amex couldn't get more than a few merchants to go along with it, doomed the project. They stopped giving out free smartcard readers pretty quickly. The company I work for now uses smart-cards in a K-of-N split key scheme to authenticate administrators of secure proxy servers. These are actually selling to real live customers and work just fine. Niche markets like these are the only place where smart card use will be growing in the near term, unless Larry Ellison and Scott "you have no privacy" McNealy get their fat government contracts for implementing the single signon surveilance state... Eric