Getting Smart About Smart Cards--Slowly

The full potential for smart cards--those intelligent, credit card-like access cards with embedded solid-state memory chips--has been far from realized in the United States. That's not stopping computer makers from offering smart cards as security keys for their laptop computer offerings.

Smart cards can reduce the cost of procuring multiple computers, provide secure access to sensitive data, and lock out unauthorized users of the system.

Smart cards are hot in Europe, and at the recent Cartes 2000 Conference held in Paris, Microsoft was on hand to announce rollouts of a variety of development kits for smart cards. Nearly every major U.S. computer maker currently offers smart cards as a security feature on their laptop computers and on many PCs. But unlike the European effort to have smart cards serve a number of functions, domestic computer makers are utilizing smart cards for security-specific tasks. (See "Gates: Get Smart About Security.")

Complicating the evolution of smart cards is the fact that although they have been helping enable more secure devices for several years, less-than-mature standards for smart cards combined with conflicting vendor interests have hindered the march toward a one-card-fits-all world.

This has left smart card technology, for the meantime, relegated to specific, nonoverlapping functions such as laptop computer security, entrance-way identification, and online transaction protection, according to a study by Forrester Research, a market research firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Not Enough?

Officials for San Jose, California-based Acer America, which introduced smart card and biometric fingerprint-reading security features on its recently launched TravelMate 350 notebook computer, agree that while smart cards have more potential, the domestic niche for smart cards currently lies in the narrow application of notebook computer security. (See "Acer Notebook Supports Security Cards, Wireless.")

"We think the market for smart cards in the United States is going to grow," says Jerry Rycaj, the director of product relations at Acer. "But right now there's a need for more than one security approach."

Acer's smart card technology works to lock out unauthorized users at three protection levels: power-up, the launch of the operating system, and the point of folder access, although Acer still ships biometric security alongside smart card security. But as broader smart card standards arrive allowing for overlapping smart card applications, Rycaj believes smart cards "may win out in the end."

Houston-based Compaq offers smart cards as security options on the company's Armada line of laptop computers. And Manny Novoa, a staff security architect at Compaq, agrees that having to use a different smart card for every personal security application has hurt smart cards as far as domestic adoption is concerned.

"I think one of the issues we have with smart cards is all the specialized applications--the fact you have to use one smart card for log-in applications and typically another card for database applications. The future will be cards with multiple personalities on them, although there are branding issues in the financial world that may prevent this," Novoa says, referring to conflicts that may arise between companies such as Visa and American Express cooperating on a cobranded card.