Gates Calls For Move To Smart Cards

[Patrick Oonk <patrick () PINE NL>]

(05/09/00, 2:32 p.m. ET) By Stuart Glascock, TechWeb
News

LAS VEGAS -- Microsoft chairman and chief software
architect Bill Gates said passwords are the weakest link
in IT security and called on hardware vendors and
developers to push for advances in smart cards.

"We need to move away from passwords as the dominant
approach to authentication," Gates said in his opening
keynote address Tuesday at Networld+Interop 2000.
"There is a lot of work to be done in the industry to get
this bootstrapped. This is going to be a huge milestone as
end-user authentication moves to smart cards."

Microsoft (stock: MSFT) is working with Atmel (stock:
ATML) to develop secure smart card systems using a
special version of the Windows operating system and the
chip company's flash-based smart card ICs.

Gates also called interoperability a key industry focus for
the next few years. (Concurrently, Microsoft announced
the release of the second version Windows Services for
Unix.) He also noted that the Internet age has only just
begun.

"The Internet will change more dramatically in the next five
years than in its entire history," he said. "We have just
seen the beginning. We are on the verge of moving
beyond that transaction phase to where we can think of
the Internet as platform."

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000509S0010

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