Smart Card architecture

[Eric Blossom]

Johnathan Corgan <jcorgan at aeinet.com> writes:
> I've been searching around the 'net looking for online references to
> the actual protocols and methods used in smart card user authentication,
> but have found very little.  I understand from reading Schneier that

There is a group of people working on a set of defacto standards for
interfacing to smart tokens.  The idea is to come up with an API that
is mostly vendor and technology independent.  The "standard" will be
published as PKCS #11 when its ready, and is known as "cryptoki",
pronounced crypto-key.  (Cryptographic Token Interface, I think...)

I think that you can find a draft copy somewhere on ftp.rsa.com under
pkcs-11 or pkcs-11-dev.  There's also a mailing list. Send subscribe
request to pkcs-11-dev-request at rsa.com

Eric Blossom