Contactless smart card

[3][4] Since then, smart cards with contactless interfaces have been increasingly popular for payment and ticketing applications such as mass transit.

The various standards emerging are local in focus and are not compatible, though the MIFARE Classic card from Philips has a large market share in the United States and Europe.

In more recent times, Visa and MasterCard have agreed to standards for general "open loop" payments on their networks, with millions of cards deployed in the U.S.,[5] in Europe and around the world.

Contactless smart cards are being integrated into ICAO biometric passports to enhance security for international travel.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for and usage of contactless credit and debit cards has increased, although coins and banknotes are generally safe and this technology will thus not reduce the spread of the virus.

When the readers are used for public transit they are commonly located on fare boxes, ticket machines, turnstiles, and station platforms as a standalone unit.

RFID devices usually do not include writeable memory or microcontroller processing capability as contactless smart cards often do.

An example is Porto's multi-application transport card, called Andante, that uses a chip in contact and contactless (ISO/IEC 14443 type B) mode.

Instead, they use a built-in inductor, using the principle of resonant inductive coupling, to capture some of the incident electromagnetic signal, rectify it, and use it to power the card's electronics.

[citation needed] In a number of cases these cards carry an electronic wallet as well as fare products, and can be used for low-value payments.

They are only distributed in the U.S. Payment occurs in a similar fashion to mag-stripe, without a PIN and often in off-line mode (depending on parameters of the terminal).

Differential power analysis[11] involves measuring the precise time and electric current[dubious – discuss] required for certain encryption or decryption operations.

Smart cards can be physically disassembled by using acid, abrasives, or some other technique to obtain direct, unrestricted access to the on-board microprocessor.

Although such techniques obviously involve a fairly high risk of permanent damage to the chip, they permit much more detailed information (e.g. photomicrographs of encryption hardware) to be extracted.