on tue sep NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERpm NUMBER yannick gingras wrote this make me wonder about the relative protection of smart cards they have an internal procession unit around NUMBERmhz can we consider them as trusted hardware the ability to ship smart cards periodicaly uppon cashing of a monthly subscription fee would not raise too much the cost of renting the system smart card do their own self encryption can they be used to decrypt data needed by the system the input of the system could me mangled and the would keep a reference of how long it was in service this sounds really feasible but i may be totaly wrong i may also be wrong about the safety of a smart card what do you think that s similar to using hard locks either the old parallel or the new usb the problem is that that piece of hardware is trustworthy but the rest of the pc isn t so a cracker just needs to simulate the lock smart card or peek at the executable after the lock has been deactivated regards luciano rocha consciousness that annoying time between naps 