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Smart cards Basics

Smart Cards are ideal as providers of tamper resistant storage for protecting private keys, account numbers, passwords and also other forms of personal information. They also serve to isolate security critical computations involving authentication and digital signatures.

Smart cards are being used world wide for a wide variety of daily tasks.Some of them are listed below:

Loyalty and stored value

A primary use of smart cards is stored value, particularly loyalty programs that track and incentivize repeat customers. Stored value is more convenient and safer than cash. For issuers, float is realized on unspent balances and residuals on balances that are never used. For multi-chain retailers that administer loyalty programs across many different businesses and Point of sale systems, smart cards can centrally locate and track all data. The applications are numerous, from parking and laundry to gaming, as well as all retail and entertainment uses.

Travel & Transport

Airlines have begun implementing smart cards for ticketless travel, boarding passes and receipts, as well as for airlines.They have also brought in their own version of customer loyalty programs such as " air miles" or "frequent flyer programs".

The other areas of transport industry are using the smart cards for electronic travellers cheques, fare and toll collection and even as car keys.

Personal Banking

As banks enter competition in newly opened markets such as investment brokerages, they are securing transactions via smart cards at an increased rate. Customers can use secure smart cards for fast, 24-hour electronic funds transfers over the Internet. Hence, improving the customer service.

Smart cards can make the banking process incredibly safe. First, the client has to authenticate himself against the server before getting access to accounts, after which individual transactions have to be authenticated to prevent misuse or replay.

In financial markets, smart cards represent the next generation of credit cards and transaction cards. They are the future of electronic money and electronic commerce and can be used for portfolio management and electronic signature verification, as well as secure banking access.

Multimedia and Online services

The future of broadcast entertainment lies with video on demand and pay per view type viewing and smart cards provide provide the ideal means to authenticate subscribers and remit payment in exchange for the broadcast material.

Here customer and provider require a secure transaction system, since the provider does not want to supply material to non-subscribers and customers need to be sure that they will only be charged for the material they have viewed.

Another similar mechanism will eventually be required for online services offered over the internet. The smart card provides the ideal means to authenticate subsribers and to pay for material in terms of pages viewed or kilobytes downloaded.

Health care

The explosion of health care data brings up new challenges to the efficiency of patient care and privacy safeguards. Smart cards solve both challenges with secure storage and distribution of everything from emergency data to benefits status. This will result in the rapid identification of patients which will improve the treatment.It is also a conveinient for the patients to carry data .Also,the cost of maintaining the records will be reduced.

Home Use

Already in use in satellite TV decoders, smart card reader will more likely be integrated into the PC, personal internet access appliance or set up box and even television itself eventually.

In time, a single card and reader combination will provide access to subscription channels, pay per view events and the internet , all driven from the comfort of your armchair!

Personal Information

Due to the security afforded by smart cards, they can be used to store personal information such as driver's license & car registrations, passport and official documents, medical records, electronic benefits, electronic voting and electronic currency.

Telephones

This is one area where people are already likely to encounter smart cards on a everyday basis.Telephone cards can be loaded with units and used in public telephones. Similar to the electronic cash idea, hey can be replenished once all units have been used.

An even more common usage is the SIM (Subscriber identification module). This is a miniature smart card consisting of just a chip on a plastic substrate, used by digital cellular (GSM) phone operators to enable the use of GSM phone on their network.

E-commerce

Smart cards make it easy for consumers to securely store information and cash for purchasing.They offer many advantages. The card has the ability to carry personal account, credit and buying preference information that can be accessed with a mouse click which avoids filling up of forms manually. Cards can manage and control expenditures with automatic limits and reporting.

The card acts as a secure depository form for points and rewards and hence, Internet loyalty programs can be deployed among multiple vendors.The user can pay nominal costs without being charged for a transaction fee like that of credit cards.