To promote
interoperability among smart cards and readers,
the International Standards Organization (ISO)
developed the ISO 7816 standard for integrated
circuit cards with contacts. These specifications
focused on interoperability at the physical,
electrical, and data-link protocol levels.
In 1996, Europay,
MasterCard, and VISA defined an industry-specific
smart card specification that adopted the ISO
7816 standards and defined some additional data
types and encoding rules for use by the financial
services industry. This industry standard is
called the EMV standard. The European
telecommunications industry also embraced the ISO
7816 standard for their Global System for Mobile
Communications (GSM) smart card specification to
enable identification and authentication of
mobile phone users.
While all of these
specifications (ISO 7816, EMV, and GSM) were a
step in the right direction, each was either too
low-level or application-specific to provide
broad industry solutions. Application
interoperability issues, such as device-independent
APIs, developer tools, and resource sharing were
not addressed by any of these specifications.
Extra
Links
http://www.iso.ch
|
