How will smart cards be used in electronic commerce?
Smart cards are an excellent medium for carrying password-protected personal data. Private information such as medical records or secret crypto keys can be stored on a card in a form accessible only to the card carrier. In addition, smart cards can store value. Card carriers can decide who to share data with and who to transact business with and use their cards only with those vendors they choose to trust. The most common form of smart card for commerce is the register-based stored-value card. Somewhat ironically, one of the most unfortunate consequence of this kind of smart card is that secret keys on the card are known only to the issuing bank and *must remain secret from the owner*. If the card owner can somehow retrieve a secret key, then they can mint electronic cash. Card Java may enhance smart card security, or maybe not One of the biggest problems in Java security is figuring out how to preserve type safety while at the same time allowing dynamic class loading. If you can confu
