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Smart-cards: A cost-effective solution against electronic fraud Abstract Smart-cards have the tremendous advantage, over their magnetic stripe ancestors, of being able to execute cryptographic algorithms locally in their internal circuitry. This means that the users secrets (be these PIN codes or keys) never have to leave the boundaries of the tamper-resistant silicon chip, thus bringing maximum security to the overall system in which the cards participate. Smart-cards contain special-purpose microcontrollers with built-in self-programmable memory and tamper-resistant features intended to make the cost of a malevolent attack far superior to the benefits. This paper is both a survey of the existing components, their applications and an attempt to describe some of their possible evolutions. 1 What is a smart-card? In the time-scale of the silicon industry, the idea of inserting a chip into a plastic card is rather old : the first patents are now twenty years old but practical applications emerged only a eight years ago due to limitations in storage and processing capacities of past circuit technology. New silicon geometries and processing refinements lead the industry to new generations of cards and more ambitious applications such as wireless communications; (GSM), pay-TV, loyalty and physical access-control. Over the last four years there has been an increasing demand for smart-cards from national administrations and large companies such as telephone operators, banks and insurance corporations. More recently, another market opened up with the increasing popularity of home networking and Internet. The physical support of a conventional smart-card is a plastic rectangle on which can be printed information concerning the application or the issuer (even advertising) as well as readable information about the card-holder (as for instance, a validity date or a photograph). This support can also carry a magnetic stripe or a bar code label. An array of ei