What good are smartcard readers for PCs

[James A. Donald]

    --
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?


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         James A. Donald
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