Smart cards or IC cards offer a huge potential for information
processing purposes. The portability and processing power of IC cards
allow for highly secure conditional access and reliable distributed
information processing. IC cards that can perform highly sophisticated
cryptographic computations are already available. Their application in
the financial services and telecom industries are well known. But the
potential of IC cards go well beyond that. Their applicability in
mainstream Information Technology and the Networked Economy is limited
mainly by our imagination; the information processing power that can be
gained by using IC cards remains as yet mostly untapped and is not well
understood. Here lies a vast uncovered research area which we are only
beginning to assess, and which will have a great impact on the eventual
success of the technology. The research challenges range from electrical
engineering on the hardware side to tailor-made cryptographic
applications on the software side, and their synergies.
This volume comprises the proceedings of the Fourth Working Conference
on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications (CARDIS 2000), which
was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing
(IFIP) and held at the Hewlett-Packard Labs in the United Kingdom in
September 2000.
CARDIS conferences are unique in that they bring together researchers
who are active in all aspects of design of IC cards and related devices
and environments, thus stimulating synergy between different research
communities from both academia and industry. This volume presents the
latest advances in smart card research and applications, and will be
essential reading for smart card developers, smart card application
developers, and computer science researchers involved in computer
architecture, computer security, and cryptography.