Smart Cards – Present and Future

Smart cards have been utilized excessively during the last couple of decades. In recent years though, a new generation of smart cards evolved: programmable smart cards. In this paper the authors give an overview of the current state of the technology and compare the cards on the market. They will also examine the trends of development, thus extrapolating their experiences about the present to the future. They also compare the predicted smart card to the ideal one, and try to describe the theoretical and practical boundaries that separate these two.