Abstract :
Smart cards, or IC cards, have recently begun to appear in many applications, e.g. banking, telephony and TV decoders. So far their use has been restricted to a set of very specific purposes. However, a smart card contains a microprocessor and a memory, so that it can be used for many functions that are presently performed by other devices, such as papers, keys, purses and also, sometimes, other computers. Smart cards provide a high level of security and enable a new family of information systems to be designed. 100 million IC cards will be manufactured in 1991 throughout the world. The paper is both a survey of the existing technology and an attempt to describe some future possibilities
