Re: What good are smartcard readers for PCs
"James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> writes:
Increasingly however, we see smartcard interfaces sold for PCs. What for, I wonder?
Companies buy a few readers for their developers who write software to work with the cards. They may even roll out a few in pilots, and put out a stack of press releases and print brochures advertising how hip they are for using smart cards. Eventually the clients discover how much of a bitch they are to work with (installation problems/buggy drivers/incompatibilities/not having your card when you need it/etc, not helped by the fact that smart card vendor after- sales support is the most client-hostile of any PC hardware type I know of) that 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. Peter.
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
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Eric Murray -
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