This paper presents an overview of the history, commercialization, technology, standards, and current and future applications of smart cards. Section I is an overview of smart cards, including their current global use in identification, verification and authorization applications through their ability to support transaction processing, information management and multiple applications on a single card. This section also includes a summary of the invention and early development and application of smart cards. The second section describes a typical smart card-based transaction, tracing it from the initial contact between a card and the card reader through the transaction to termination of the transaction. The third section describes the physical characteristics of the smart card, and its associated contact and contactless inter-faces, integrated circuit (IC) chip and processor capacity. Section 4 summarizes the international standards associated with smart cards, including those related to interoperability among contact and contactless cards, and their respective reading devices. In Section 5, the focus is a high-level discussion of associated access technologies, including a more detailed look at magnetic stripe and barcode technologies and standards. This section includes a very brief mention of the impact of RISC-based technologies and Sun's Java(TM) Virtual Machine(R). Section 6 discusses smart card security relating to the card's ability to authorize and facilitate electronic, logical and physical access to controlled applications and physical locations. Also discussed is physical security, which relates to cardholders, environment and cards tampering, and data security, which is related to smart cards ability to support cryptography and cross validation of data stored on the cards across multiple databases for purposes of identification verification. Section 7 concludes this paper with a look at the future of smart card-related developments, including those related to both technology and applications. Technology-related developments include the support of more than a single operating system on the processor chip and peripheral card technologies. Application-related developments include those related to identification, information storage and transaction processing.
