Advances in Smartcard Security

Hardware architecture Smartcards come in different shapes. First of all there is a distinction between contact cards and contact-less cards. The first kind is easily recognised by the characteristic contact stamp that appears on both credit-card sized and SIM card sized versions. The second one is more difficult to identify because the chip may be hidden not only inside a credit-card sized container, but also in badges, car keys or labels. Secure tokens like dongles (hardware keys) and other types of smart tokens are related to smartcards, but mostly less complicated. They often implement proprietary hard-encoded encryption, although some newer versions use common algorithms like DES.