Subject: Value of smart cards. Re: Signing what you don't understand

From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 23:23:40 +0200

Ben+Stefan

> Woah! Smartcard salesman detected... what about, say, a Palm, or a
> Psion? These have an advantage over smartcards, too, in that they have
> UIs. Smartcards are a technology whose time never really arrived, and is
> rapidly passing. IMO.

The discrete credit-sized smart card is probably not going to take over the world
as you say.  But the SIM/WIM card will. Actually 300 million *existing* customers can't be wrong!
It provides a cheap tamper-resistant storage and crypto-processor that *will* also be a
part of PDAs when they are "connected".  It is the ability to insert a subscription into
a mobile phone and PDA that is the driving factor now.  Later it will be PKI.

http://www.mobilephones-tng.com/papers/thenewswissarmyknife.html

But Ericsson apparently believe in smart credit-cards as they have introduced this
100% loser-product:

http://www.ericsson.se/wirelesswallet/How.htm

>Regarding PDAs I recommend the following research paper and the
>web site mentioned on the following URL:

>"Hand-Held Computers Can Be Better Smart Cards"
>Dirk Balfanz, Ed Felten. Proceedings of USENIX Security '99, August, 1999.
>http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/pub/pilotkey.php3

Nice article. See comment regarding PDAs

Anders

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From: "Peter Lipp" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 09:48:22 +0200

> *existing* customers can't be wrong!
While the pure number of customers does not prove anything (they would have
used that technology without any card on it) it definitely could provide a
solid basis for deployment. Pity is that the vendors decide to reinvent the
world with all the WAP-versions of whatever already had been defined... Our
experience with one of the vendors in an EU-project showed lack of interest
in implementing relevant standards upcoming in the EU, as long as they don't
start with WA(P).

Peter