IP: Smart Cards in China.

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: 17 Oct 95


ABSTRACT: Smart cards, which, in China, are more often called by their
technical name "IC cards (integrated circuit cards"), than by their
common name "intelligent card", are now a very active topic, with
development promoted by the national Golden Card Project.  In this
report, we shall present some observations concerning smart cards in
China, and some examples to illustrate the rapid growth in their use.




=====================START OF REPORT ATIP95.79===========================






                     Smart Cards in China.
         Prof William (Bill) Yong-Chuan Chen, ATIP, China


1. INTRODUCTION
2. ONE SMART CARD COMPANY
3. IC CARDS APPEARING EVERYWHERE
4. RECENT ITEMS ABOUT IC CARD IN CHINA
5. RECENT PUBLISHED REFERENCES
6. CONTACTS






1. INTRODUCTION


It was about three years ago when I first came across a discussion about
"smart card" work Los Alamos National Laboratory. At that point, I
wondered whether this was a purely theoretical idea, and I must admit
that I had never seen such a thing in the US before, although this was
invented over twenty years ago in Europe and has been in use there for
some time. It was about ten years ago when I first heard of the amazing
idea of a public key cryptography system, and at the same time I learned
the theory of automata and formal languages without any thought about
the possible connection between these two topics. It was six years ago
when I took a course on cryptography at the computer science department
of MIT, the cradle of the RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman public key
algorithm) crypto-system. Very recently, I came across to a piece a news
from a Chinese newspaper about smart card R&D at Los Alamos National
Laboratory. Two weeks ago, all these notions came to me again at one
place with the real thing -- IC card (integrated circuit card, smart
card). In this report, I shall give an example of how a small company
operates in the field of IC cards. We recently visited a company in
Beijing via introductions through a friend, which is generally referred
to as "guanxi" (connection). We were given the opportunity to see their
entire manufacturing (assembly) procedure, witnessed their business
operations and discussed their use of cryptography. We also give some
remarks on the trends of the IC card growth in China.
 [The following sections of this report are available to ATIP subscribers]