What good are smartcard readers for PCs

[Eric Murray]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 07:12:47PM +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> "James A. Donald" <jamesd at 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