Smart cards: The Smartest Technology✔✔
“It’s not that we use technology, we LIVE technology.”
-Godfrey Reggio
In a world where we are surrounded by gadgets, it is right to say that we live in technology. One of the best gifts of technology to us is smart cards. A smart card is an electronic chip card that is used to store information and help the user to access the related resources.
Smart cards have gained popularity through their amazing capability to store personal data in a confidential manner. It is a small piece of card that is used to store the data of an individual in banks, educational institutions, and workplaces where identification is necessary. Even the sim card of the mobile phones can be called a smart card. It consists of integrated circuit technology that uses a microprocessor or a combination of some circuits.
Storing and receiving the information from a smart card is quite a simple process. The details in a smart card are read with the help of a device called a card reader which has contact pads embedded to it to sense the card as long as the card is attached to them. The information in the card is sent to the host system. First, the authenticity of the card is checked, and then the required instructions are processed.
A smart card usually contains an I/O system, a CPU, and memory, and based on the use of each of them there are a variety of smart cards available nowadays that can be listed as follows:
- Contactless cards
- Contact cards
- Dual interface card
- Hybrid card
- Memory-based card
- Microprocessor-based card
Smart cards have given more security than just pin codes and passwords. Moreover, they have a lot of other advantages like the user-friendly nature of the cards, portability, consistency, reduced scam, organized form of data, and much more that has made them accepted all over the world.
There are a few disadvantages of smart cards too. The information of a stolen card can’t be received, fluids can damage the cards, and the requirement of a card reader every time we use them are some of the drawbacks. Though there are some shortcomings, they are seen as negligible over the wide-ranging benefits of smart cards.
Technology is an ever-improving science that ensures that all the shortcomings of the present technology would be removed in the future. Smart cards technology is the best authentication technology today with much more improvements to come in the future.
I hope you have gained some value from this story. ThankYou for reading.
