The complexity arises because, when it’s just printed plastic, it doesn’t take a national mint to build a fraudulent card. All the pure printing mechanisms can be attacked through ever evolving printing technology, and at ever decreasing prices. So, as a way to address counterfeit printing, additional information conveyance mechanisms were added to the card; embossed characters, holograms and magnetic stripes. Each step an increment towards a more secure token and, interestingly enough, often a step toward machine readability as a way to automate the authentication process. So, we’ve now advanced beyond just conveying information and have entered the world of interpretation of that information. Thus, the current incarnation of the banking chip card is a regular banking card with a small computer inside

As we will consider in some greater detail later, communication is an ever more increasingly complex problem. Conveying more and more information is a tough problem, but the intelligent use of that information is even more daunting.

The basic banking chip card physically looks like a credit card with a small metal faceplate on the front of it. That faceplate allows for electrical connectivity between the outside world and the computer embedded in the plastic card. This electrical connectivity is one means of effecting basic information flow between the card’s computer and the outside world, as represented by another computer. First, electrical power can flow across this metal faceplate so that the outside world can provide the power to run the computer in the card. An interesting point, when the card is in your pocket it’s not powered. So, it’s not operating, thus keeping it away from a class of electronic attacks.

Also, across the metal faceplate on the card can flow bits of data, strings of electrical ones and zeros that convey information from the computer in the card to the computer in the outside world. This information flow allows the two computers (the outside world and the card) to cooperate on deciding what to do in certain situations and perhaps even how to do it; that is, they can negotiate and implement policy.

Relate this back to the conveyance of information through various artistic media that we mentioned earlier. There we saw that the true information transfer was often submerged somewhat below the surface of what we initially or easily perceived. Such is the case with trusted computer communications. The early transactions between the outside world and the embedded computer were simple indeed. “Tell me where you come from: Visa, MasterCard or American Express?” But, then cards began to be counterfeited and the questions became, “After you tell me where you came from, tell me your ‘account number’.” Implicit in the question was the fact that the questioner had a way to check on the account number through some mechanism external to the card. But, it was awkward to always have this alternative mechanism.

So, the trusted core evolved to only give up its information if it really trusted the computer it was talking to. “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” became a way of doing business, as it perhaps has always been. With such enhanced trust conveyance, more detailed information could be conveyed to and from the core and more involved, and perhaps sensitive and/or valuable transactions pursued. This is the evolutionary pathway that we’re going down; it will be interesting to see where it leads. Whether we use a mobile phone, a personal digital assistant or an ultra-mobile computer, we trust them to represent us faithfully on the network. And that is a real topic for the remainder of the book.

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