Skaral

Why smart cards?

While there are addons that add cards like OpenSecurity they only hold the information to be later presented to a scanner. This is insufficient for application where protection of the stored data is required as with payment cards for example, where one can not guarantee the software running on the scanner is legitimate. So... in order to avoid getting your card details stolen, duplicated and used without your consent we need some zero-knowlede proof of our secret. This could potentially be done in the base game with tablets, datacard and a wireless, but I think a dedicated card that could be crafted cheeply with just CPU, EEPROM and some miniature Datacard would serve this purpose better.

So what should this smart card do? It should contain a simgle function to encrypt whatever challange string is passed to it by the reader with encryption key stored on the card. That's it. The reader can then verify if the challange string was correctly encrypted either by decrypting it themselves or relaying it to the card issuer.