CARDIS '02, the joint IFIP/USENIX International Conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications, will bring together researchers and practitioners in the development and deployment of smart card systems and technologies.

The two day conference features keynote speaker Vincent Cordonnier, LIFL; 14 refereed papers; panel discussions; Work-In-Progress reports as well as ample opportunities to informally interact with fellow attendees and speakers.

Unlike events devoted to commercial and application aspects of smart cards, the CARDIS conferences bring together researchers who are active in all aspects of the design, validation, and application of smart cards. The breadth of smart card research stimulates a synergy among disparate research communities, making CARDIS an ideal opportunity to present the latest research advances.

Importance of Smart Card Research
The portability, processing power, and tamper resistance of smart cards offers a platform for secure conditional access to information and applications. Smart cards significantly extend the scope of distributed systems by providing a trusted platform for cryptographically secured computation and storage. Notwithstanding their long history, relative to modern computing, the applicability of smart cards in distributed systems remains an untapped resource, limited mainly by our imagination and understanding. Here lie vast uncovered research areas that will have a huge impact on the eventual success of the technology. The research challenges span many domains, including hardware design, cryptographic applications, distributed system architecture, and formal modeling.