On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 15:42, David Corcoran wrote:

> I'm actually quite impressed with the contactless smart cards that are 
> emerging in the marketplace.
> There are a couple full featured ones that do everything a normal card 
> would do and are quite fast.

Processing speed is usually proportional to clock speed not to IO
channel technology (assuming internal crystal in chip) so I assume you
are talking of the IO speed here?  As far as I am aware "normal"
(contacted) cards run at 9.6-115Kb/s whereas contactless run at
400--800Kb/s.  Certainly the Sharp systems run at this "overclocked"
higher rate.

> I like the idea of contactless cards used with passports.  Although 
> passports generally have a physical
> picture printed, a contactless card would provide a high speed, 
> convenient mechanism to pass a
> trusted, digitally signed digital picture of the user as well.
> 
> One of my big concerns on the emergence of contactless is that we are 
> sort of starting over from a protocol perspective.
> Contact card readers are just now finally getting to the point where 
> interfaces are standardized and a
> reader will work with lots of different cards without problems.  As 
> contactless emerges, I'm almost positive there
> will be similar issues with certain readers not working well with 
> certain cards like we had with the contact cards
> a few years ago.   Hopefully it won't take long before vendor A-Z's 
> contactless cards will work with vendor B's contactless
> reader.  Contactless works well now because the contactless provider 
> provides the card and reader in most cases or has
> strategic relationships with another vendor that provides the reader.  
> As this technology broadens, we may open ourselves up
> to problems we had with contact based cards a few years ago.

I guess ISO7816 should have dealt with all the card / reader
interoperability but somehow failed.  I guess there could be a problem
with ISO14443 particularly as there is a A version a B version and a C
version.  However, as far as I am aware the main problem with
contactless cards is the power transfer (some cards need more power that
some readers provide) not the T=CL protocol.

> > On Mar 5, 2004, at 1:14 AM, Anders Rundgren wrote:

> But I believe a "Wireless Citizen Card" is much more
> > interesting long-term because if you are "identified"
> > you can "be" all the other things you need to be like
> > paying using 3D Secure which do not require a local
> > credit card (as it resides on secure servers).
> >
> > So far it looks like the EU will lose the initiative as
> > we have no dominant software vendors and other
> > important parties seem unable to go outside of their
> > own core business.
> >
> > I say it one more time: The smart ID card is dead and gone.
> > It is beyond repair.

If the smart ID card is dead and gone why are so many governments
putting large projects together to make such cards a reality.  What
makes you say it is dead and gone?

Perhaps your comment related to the huge debate as to whether the card
should just be a token and token verification system with all other
processing in the reader or host system (or remote server) or whether
the card should have real processing capability.

-- 
Russel.
====================================================================
Dr Russel Winder, Chief Technology Officer     Tel: +44 20 8680 8712
OneEighty Software Ltd                         Fax: +44 20 8680 8453
Cygnet House, 12-14 Sydenham Road              [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Croydon, Surrey CR9 2ET, UK                    http://www.180sw.com

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