...
This is not completely true -- I have seen some high-end cards that use the PIN code entered by the user as the encryption key. And it is quite easy to do similar things on Java cards...
With any kind of reasonable PIN length, though, this isn't all that helpful, because of the small set of possible PINs. And smartcards don't generally have a lot of processing power, so making the PIN->key mapping expensive doesn't help much, either.
/Krister
--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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