Smart cards are credit card-sized plastic cards with an integrated microcontroller chip. This chip is protected against physical and logical tampering, thus unauthorized access to internal data structures is virtually impossible. This makes a smart card an excellent device for storing secret cryptographic keys and other sensitive data. In practice, smart cards are used for applications like dig...

Smart cards improve the convenience and security of any transaction. They provide tamper-proof storage of user and account identity. Multifunction cards are used to manage network system access, store value and other data. The cards carry personal account, credit and buying-preference information and thus, security becomes a primary issue here. Public Key Cryptography plays an essential role in...

Power analysis is a very successful cryptanalytic technique which extracts secret information from smart cards by analysing the power consumed during the execution of their internal programs. It is a passive attack in the sense that it can be applied in an undetectable way during normal interaction with the smart card without modifying the card or the protocol in any way. The attack is particul...

We live in a world which is increasingly electronic, particularly in terms of the global economy. However, the development of information and communication technology is also affecting personal finances. Far more people than ever before now have bank accounts, use cheque cards, credit cards, debit cards and ‘smart’ cards, and pay their bills by direct debit or standing order. Their accounts are...

Consumer credit is any of the many forms of commerce under which an individual obtains goods or services on condition of a promise to pay for their value, along with a fee (the interest), at some specific future date or dates. Consumer credit can take a variety of forms: bank loans, credit cards, retailer’s card, car finance schemes, etc. In industrialized countries, this form of credit has bec...

Soft-products are intangible products that can be consumed without shipment, such as software, music and calling cards (calling time). The demand for soft-products on the Internet has been increasing for the past few years. At the same time, fraudulent credit card transactions have also increased. Compared to tangible products, fraudulent credit card transactions on soft-products are easier to ...

Soft-products are intangible products that can be consumed without shipment, such as software, music and calling cards (calling time). The demand for soft-products on the Internet has been increasing for the past few years. At the same time, fraudulent credit card transactions have also increased. Compared to tangible products, fraudulent credit card transactions on soft-products are easier to ...

Communal responsibility, a medieval institution studied by Greif (2006), supported the use of credit among European merchants in the absence of modern enforcement technologies. This paper shows how this mechanism helps to overcome enforcement problems in anonymous buyer/seller transactions. In a village economy version of the Lagos and Wright (2005) model, agents trading anonymously in decentra...

Medication error has been identified as a major factor affecting patient safety. Many innovative efforts such as Computerised Physician Order Entry (CPOE), a Pharmacy Information System, automated dispensing machines and Point of Administration Systems have been carried out with the aim of improving medication safety. However, areas remain that require urgent attention. One main area will be th...

MasterCard and VisaCard use credit cards to support a number of services, such as Masterphone or Visaphone, which allow cardholders to make phone calls from any telephone. However, these services take little or no security precautions. Although SET protocol has defined a secure payment method for card transactions over open networks, it cannot fit in telephone systems. In this paper, we propose...