Giesecke & Devrient now provides SECCOS smart card operating system with contactless interface
02 March, 2005
category: Contactless, Financial
German-based Giesecke & Devrient has widened the appeal of its SECCOS smart card operating system by including a contactless interface. Dubbed the SECCOS Dual Interface, it allows data transmission via contactless or contact-based solutions. Besides payment transactions, card-issuing enterprises can offer their customers additional applications that are quick and secure.
Hanover/Munich – Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) has expanded the SECCOS smart card operating system specified by the banking industry to include a contactless interface. The improvement will make possible additional card applications that provide benefits such as speed and easy handling for both card issuers and customers.
G&D has taken SECCOS and added to it the ISO/IEC 14443 Type A contactless transmission protocol on a dual interface chip, resulting in an operating system dubbed SECCOS Dual Interface (DI). Dual Interface makes possible data transmission via an over-the-air, i.e. contactless, interface as well as through contact-based one. Service providers who opt for the new card will profit from the high level of market penetration of the SECCOS operating system, which has become established as a secure chip card platform. The system offers the highest level of investment protection.
Besides payment transactions, card-issuing enterprises can therefore offer their customers additional applications that are quick, secure, and convenient.
“Contactless applications mean users no longer have to stick their cards into a terminal. They simply hold them up to an appropriate card reader,” says Michael Kuemmerle, head of Giesecke & Devrient’s Payment Division. “For example, SECCOS Dual Interface offers new means of supporting and expanding the implementation of e-ticketing within public transportation systems. These cards can also assume the functions of an ID badge – to gain entrance to a company’s premises, for example – as well as help employers and employees keep track of hours worked,” explains Kuemmerle.
The MIFARE emulation based on the industries contactless smart card standard and supported by the cards makes it possible to integrate them fairly easily into existing infrastructures, thus offering significant synergies and economies of scale. Since accessing the respective applications requires no direct contact between card and reader, throughput speed increases as costs for terminal maintenance decrease.
Service providers can choose to access the SECCOS D.I.-based dual interface card through either its contact interface or its contactless interface – provided over-the-air transmission is allowed for the application. Payment functions and signature applications according to Germany’s digital signature law are to remain excluded from contactless data transmission, although SECCOS, being a multifunctional operating system, has been proven capable of handling such functions.
SECCOS, having been specified by the banking industry, is a secure platform for numerous payment applications, offering, for example, electronic purse and EMV functionality for national and international debit transactions. The card also carries an integrated juvenile protection feature. With its universally applicable signature function, the operating system also supports encrypted e-mail communication and safeguards electronic transactions over the Internet, including online banking and digital signing of contracts.