FGCS special issue on smart cards

A smart card is a small computer with a number of interesting properties. A smart card is reliable and inexpensive, and it is packaged in the same way as a credit card. This makes it feasible to distribute smart cards to millions of users. A smart card is a programmable computer, and thus ooers exibility. Finally, a smart card can protect data from unauthorised access. These properties make smart cards suitable for a staggering number of uses in every day life. This issue provides a perspective on the state of the art for this exciting technology. This issue contains an invited paper and a selection of the papers presented Both conferences were well attended: 60 participants came to Lille and Amsterdam attracted 90. The invited paper by Quisquater presents the past and present of smart card research and indicates possible avenues for its future. The thesis of the paper is that smart cards are in their adolescence. There is good hope that the technology will mature and come to full bloom, but more research is needed to achieve this. The rst two regular papers present novel ideas for the future use of smart cards. The paper by Schneier and Kelsey uses cryptology to certify outcomes of programs. This might ultimately make it possible to bill for software usage. The paper by Alexandre discusses biometric authentication based on the differences in the way people type on computer keyboards. This form of biometry is probably more acceptable than most other forms of biometrics. The next three papers describe advances in the theory and practice of smart cards. The paper by Dhem and Quisquater describes diierent approaches to compressing information that is to be processed by a smart card. Compression is highly relevant for the severely resource constrained smart card. In the paper by Alberda et al an example is given of how formal methods can be used to reason about a programming language used to construct a trustworthy smart card operating system. In the paper by Hollmann et al an application of statistically analysing data obtained from monitoring the hardware is dis