ABSTRACT
Smart cards, along with their new set of underlying technologies, have created a potentially huge market for a wide range of applications. To understand how communication takes place in these applications, we need to explore various standards that have been defined by well-known industrial organizations and standard-making bodies across the world to control their functionality and the way different communicating entities interact. These standards not only provide shape to the overall communication scenario, but also ensure that the underlying communication requirements are being constantly met. Moreover, to facilitate development in the technology, different open source tools of varying purpose and configuration are being developed. This chapter provides a discussion of different communication standards, application areas (finance, access control, retail, and so forth), and open-source tools that are used for developing, implementing, and testing smart card–based systems and applications in detail.
