A Smart card is a security token with an embedded chip. Smart cards are usually identical to drivers licenses and can be made of metal or plastic. They are connected to a reader via direct physical contact (also known as chip and dip) or short-range wireless connectivity standards such as Near Field Communication (NFC)).

Smart cards

The chip on a Smart card can be a microcontroller chip or an embedded memory chip. Smart cards are designed to prevent tampering and use encryption to protect the information in the memory. These cards with microcontroller chips have the ability to perform the processing functions on the card and can add, delete and manipulate information in the chips memory.

The first widely used Smart card was the Télécarte, a French pay-phone payment phone card introduced in 1983. Smart cards are now ubiquitous, and magnetic stripe card technology is rapidly taking over. Only 300 bytes of non-volatile memory cards can rewrite memory and have no processing power.

There are various international standards and specifications for Smart card technology, some of which focus on industry-specific applications. In the United States, Smart card technology conforms to international standards (ISO IEC 7816 and ISO IEC 1443) and is supported by the Smart Card Alliance.

For Smart card technologies that can recover information from the chip, various attacks can be performed. Differential power analysis can derive the private key on the movie used in public key algorithms such as RSA, and some implementations of symmetric ciphers may also be vulnerable to periodic attacks or differential power analysis. Smart cards can also be physically disassembled to access the on-board microchip.