What good are smartcard readers for PCs

[James A. Donald]

    --
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.    

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         James A. Donald
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