E-commerce: "Smarter smart cards on the Internet" -- the latest trends in smart card technology and application Professor Samuel Chanson Director of Cyberspace Center and Director of the Internet Business Consortium, HKUST
The new generation of smart cards provide multi-function and strong encryption capabilities. These and other properties together with the emerging open standards on smart card platforms make the smart card ideal for supporting business transactions over the Internet. The Cyberspace Center at HKUST is working on several smart card based electronic commerce projects supported by two ISF (Industry Support Funds) grants. Established in March 1996 with a grant from the HKSAR Industry Department. The Center aims to help local industries and businesses make effective use of the Internet in improving their competitiveness in the world market. To support this goal, the Center provides services in terms of promotion and training, and participates in research and development with the objective of transferring the technology to local industry. Our current projects include smart card over the Internet for authentication, business transactions (e-commerce) and access control, mobile e-commerce, Chinese web technologies, network security and web performance. Of crucial importance to secure transactions over the Internet is the authenticity of user identity and the secrecy of information. Integration of smart cards, biometrics, and public key infrastructure (PKI) is under investigation to offer a high level of security to facilitate the growth of Internet commerce. A new project has just started to build an open and secure infrastructure and protocol that enables business transactions and payments from cell phones. The system makes use of the SIM card and PKI to ensure end-to-end security between the consumer, the merchant and the bank. Some prototype systems for conducting secure business transactions over the Internet have been built. These include shopping and payment by smart cards, software protection and driver license renewal. We believe smart card based e-commerce will become popular in Hong Kong within the next couple of years.	Professor Samuel Chanson obtained his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. He taught at Purdue University and the University of British Columbia before joining HKUST in 1993 as Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Computer Science. Professor Chanson in an expert in communication technologies, and has been consulted widely by industrial corporations and government agencies in Hong Kong, the Chinese Mainland, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Canada. He is currently Director of the Cyberspace Center and Director of the Internet Business Consortium at HKUST.
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