Manufacturers of payment cards such as Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) are also issuing more cards with embedded circuits than with the traditional magnetic strip. Economic benefitĪ booming market for mobile electronic devices will likely bolster smart-card sales for the foreseeable future, most notably in encrypted SIM cards used to manage mobile data and communications accounts. Recipients' bank accounts, identity and personal information would be potentially vulnerable, wreaking havoc on unsuspecting consumers and clients. Most of those (5.1 billion) went to the telecom sector, while another 2.6 billion were used in debit or credit cards.Ī security breach not only represented high costs for the company issuing the cards, it could also have economic and privacy ramifications for card users.

That could be a costly and inconvenient endeavour, especially considering that there were about 9 billion smart cards issued in 2015. If a company issuing smart cards became aware of a breach, it had no choice but to cancel and replace every card in the network. Until these new security features were invented, all it took to compromise more than one smart card - or an entire network, for that matter - was to gain access to the master card. This master card is used to individualise large numbers of 'recipient' cards that are distributed to card holders.Ī team of Belgian and French inventors, led by Daemen and Liardet, found a way to close this security vulnerability by encrypting master cards with a security algorithm that ensures they can never be used to clone or gain access to recipient cards at a later time. Would-be criminals could exploit a loophole in how smart cards were produced, creating duplicate copies of cards by gaining access to a master card. The small gold pad includes memory banks, and sometimes microprocessors, that not only store important information for quick access, they also help protect against a full range of security threats.īut while the first generations of smart cards had intrinsic 'smart' security, it was not truly brilliant. They have been commonplace in many European countries since the mid-1990s and have since been incorporated into banking and credit cards in the US. Smart cards - credit, banking and other security cards equipped with a tell-tale, gold-coloured, square contact pad - have increasingly replaced 'traditional' magnetic-strip-based technology.

Joan he