-- James A. Donald>

...

Increasingly however, we see smartcard interfaces sold for PCs. What for, I wonder?

On 24 Sep 2002 at 1:41, Bill Stewart wrote:

I'm not convinced that the number of people selling them is closely related to the number of people buying; this could be another field like PKIs where the marketeers and cool business plans never succeeded at getting customers to use them.

On 24 Sep 2002 at 19:12, Peter Gutmann wrote:

Companies buy a few readers for their developers who write software to work with the cards. [...] Eventually the clients discover how much of a bitch they are to work with [....] users decide to live with software-only crypto until the smart card scene is a bit more mature.

Given that n_users >> n_card_vendors, this situation can keep going for quite some time.

I have found that the administrative costs of PKI are intolerable. End users do not really understand crypto, and so will fuck up. Only engineers can really control a PKI certificate, and for the most part they just do not. In principle the thingness of a smartcard should reduce administrative costs to a low level -- they should supposedly act like a purse, a key, a credit card, hence near zero user training required. The simulated thingness created by cryptographic cleverness should be manifested to the user as physical thingness of the card. Suppose, for example, we had working Chaumian digicash. Now imagine how much trouble the average end user is going to get into with backups, and with moving digicash from one computer to another. If all unused Chaumian tokens live in a smartcard, one might expect the problem to vanish. The purselike character of the card sustains the coin like character of Chaumian tokens. Of course if one has to supply the correct driver for the smart card, then the administration problem reappears. USB smartcard interfaces could solve this problem. Just plug them in, and bingo, it should just go. Ummh, wait a moment, go where, do what? What happens when one plugs in a USB smartcard interface? Still, making crypto embodied in smart cards intelligible to the masses would seem to be a soluble problem, even if not yet solved, whereas software only crypto is always going to boggle the masses. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG UpBeNFF1UW7r7Fw8pVMxQG+xJ3mwsngHIp62BxL6 4D+u3ZM5e1JbeYAKaQ4dhOQrlZ42vq05cfz83rnCZ