.Net SmartCards

By extending the Microsoft .NET programming model to the smart card, this innovative new Gemalto product offers businesses and application developers a rich feature set including managed memory, strong security, and language independence.

• Strong, two-factor authentication; aligned with Microsoft’s Crypto Next Generation architecture; plug-in available in Windows updates or natively in Windows Vista
• Rich development environment; plug-in for Visual Studio .NET
• .NET compatible; language independent
• 32-bit architecture, field-updatable OS; adherence to industry standards
• Support for future technologies such as Microsoft’s InfoCard

The combination of the .NET model and the smart card means that the card performs well as a peer computing device, maintains consistent, strong security with applications both on- and off-card, and leads the way to better integrated smart-card applications and services.

The smart card interacts easily with host applications without the need for complicated host software, and is fully integrated with the Windows environment.

For all these reasons and more, the Gemalto .NET smart card has been chosen as Microsoft’s worldwide corporate badge for logical and physical access.

Even as personalized Internet services become more common, security, privacy and confidentiality remain issues for most consumers. Having more secure authentication is certainly important and is a good initial step to protect end users, but is still not enough.
Smart cards enabled with secure web services provide more control for the user when interacting with open networks. The smart card becomes an individual personal web server interacting with the digital world.