For more than a decade, European reliance on SmartCards—to secure financial transactions, authenticate cell phones, and more recently, to launch the ePassports initiative—has grown steadily. A SmartCard is essentially a little computer that, when put on a banking card, mobile phone, or other device, acts as a gatekeeper between the stored content and the outside world. Unlike the magnetic strips of credit cards that passively spit out data as they're swiped, "the SmartCard chip plays a much more active part in the transaction," says Chris Caruk, chief technologist and VP of marketing for Aspects Software. Today, as a result of work done by Aspects, SmartCards are poised to play a much bigger role in enabling the secure transfer of content in all its glorious forms.
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