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Article: Smart cards and encryption: snoop-proof communications.
- Article from:
- EDN
- Article date:
- November 23, 1995
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. (US). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Of all the advantages that smart cards have over magnetic-stripe cards, enhanced security is probably the greatest. Part of the security advantage stems from the difficulty that forgers face in cloning smart cards. The rest comes from smart cards' ability to encrypt and decrypt text and data.
A cryptographic system based on smart cards is much like any other. it uses an encryption algorithm and an encryption key to convert an original message (plain text) into a coded message (cipher text) that can be decoded only by a decryption algorithm and a decryption key.
Crytographic schemes fall into two distinct groups -- symmetric and asymmetric. Symmetric ...