92. CREDIT CARD CONTACTLESS TECHNOLOGY

These are the best known payment cards (classical plastic card)Visa: Visa Contactless, Quick VSDC - "qVSDC", Visa Wave, MSD, payWave MasterCard: PayPass Magstripe, PayPass MChip American Express: Express Pay Chase: Blink (credit and debit cards) Roll-outs started in 2005 in USA (Asia and Europe - 2006). Contactless (non PIN) transactions cover a payment range of ~$5-50. There is an ISO 14443 PayPass implementation. All PayPass implementations may be separated on EMV and non EMV.


Non-EMV cards work like magnetic stripe cards. This is a typical card technology in the USA (PayPass Magstripe and VISA MSD). The cards do not control amount remaining. All payment passes without a PIN and usually in off-line mode. The security level of such a transaction is no greater than with classical magnetic stripe card transaction.


EMV cards have two interfaces (contact and contactless) and they work as a normal EMV card via contact interface. Via contactless interface they work almost like an EMV (card command sequence adopted on contactless features as low power and short transaction time). However, concern is also expressed about the extensive cost and potential abuse of hi-tech smartcards.


Cryptographic smart cards are often used for single sign-on. Most advanced smart cards are equipped with specialized cryptographic hardware that let you use algorithms such as RSA and DSA on board. Today's cryptographic smart cards are also able to generate key pairs on board, to avoid the risk of having more than one copy of the key (since by design there usually isn't a way to extract private keys from a smart card).