Government ID, Smart Cards, Identification and Authentication

Understanding DPA attacks and the countermeasures available to protect smart cards

Monday, January 9, 2006


The primary reason for smart card technologies growing success in the marketplace is simple – security. Smart cards are self-contained security units that can provide unparalleled barriers to fraud and piracy. But what if they were actually discovered to be insecure? Even worse, what if attackers could unobtrusively defeat a smart card’s security using inexpensive equipment? Would governments, businesses, and consumers continue to rely on them for critical transactions?

There are 1423 words in the rest of this article …

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The Smart Card Alliance Transportation Council has published a white paper examining how the transit industry can best make use of NFC technology.

“One of the major challenges facing transit agencies today is how to capitalize on the ever-growing popularity of mobile phones with a solid mobile strategy,” said Transportation Council Chairman Craig Roberts. “This white paper builds on the knowledge base developed in earlier white papers to foster a greater understanding of NFC technology, explain its role in the transit industry, and shed light on key issues facing the transit industry in developing a mobile strategy.”

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Prisoners at Tihar prisons, located near New Delhi, India, will now be using smart cards instead of paper coupons for their food purchases.

As reported by The Economic Times, the former system of paper food coupons led to misuse and illegal activity within the jail. Some prisoners would use it for currency in order to get banned substances or buy favors from others.

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Stratfor, a publisher of global intelligence and analysis, announced that CSID, a provider of global, enterprise-level identity protection and fraud detection technologies, has been retained to assist Stratfor customers whose financial information may have been compromised by recent cyber attacks.

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In an effort to increase the security of the current EMV chip and PIN, SmartMetric has created an EMV card enhanced with biometrics.

The SmartMetric Chip & Biometric EMV Card incorporates fingerprints to activate the card. It’s designed to increase the security of standard EMV chip and PIN cards, which SmartMetric claims are still vulnerable to fraud attacks, even though they are safer than a magnetic stripe card.

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Google has acquired 188 patents and 29 patents pending from IBM, some of which concern NFC technology, reports ZDNet.

Adding to the 2,053 IBM patents already turned over to Google in the past year, these new patents cover databases, mobile phones, server infrastructure, wireless telephone systems, NFC and other patents that may relate to Google’s Android mobile operating system.

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A variant of malware called Sykipot is circulating that purportedly enables it to hijack U.S. Defense Department Common Access Cards and Windows smart cards, according to Alien Vault Labs. This variant, which appears to have been put together in March 2011, has been seen in dozens of attack samples from the past year.

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