Smart Cards: The Developer's Toolkit

Chapter 2. Physical Characteristics of Smart Cards

Smart cards present a variety of faces depending primarily on the type of integrated circuit chip (ICC) embedded in the plastic card and the physical form of the connection mechanism between the card and the reader. They can be very inexpensive tokens for financial transactions such as credit cards, telephone calling tokens, or loyalty tokens from a variety of businesses. They can be access tokens for getting through locked doors, for riding on a train, or driving an automobile on a toll road. They can function as identity tokens for logging in to a computer system or accessing a World Wide Web server with an authenticated identity. Of particular interest are several such variants, including cards ...