* More educational opportunities
Continuing education is a good thing, especially if it means you can do it during the time you would normally be crawling under desks, slithering through conduits in the ceiling or grubbing in some server/router/hub room that has dust bunnies bigger than your cell phone. That is, those of you in the corporate IT department. For all of you in marketing, PR and “business development,” education time usually comes out of your morning break (9 to 10:30 a.m.) lunch “hour” (11 a.m. to 2 p.m.) or the “wind down” time at the end of the day (3 to 8 p.m.). Still, you might learn something.
Card-based tokens or “smart cards” are a hot topic these days. Many folks, especially in North America, are woefully ignorant about them, however. Can you offer a definition of a smart card?
According to the Smart Card Alliance: “A smart card is a device that includes an embedded integrated circuit chip (ICC) that can be either a secure microcontroller or equivalent intelligence with internal memory or a memory chip alone. The card connects to a reader with direct physical contact or with a remote contactless radio frequency interface. With an embedded microcontroller, smart cards have the unique ability to store large amounts of data, carry out their own on-card functions (e.g., encryption and mutual authentication) and interact intelligently with a smart card reader. Smart card technology conforms to international standards (ISO/IEC 7816 and ISO/IEC 14443) and is available in a variety of form factors, including plastic cards, fobs, subscriber identification modules (SIMs) used in GSM mobile phones, and USB-based tokens.”
If you want to learn more about smart cards, and you should, the alliance has instituted an educational Web site which will, in time, offer many different courses concerning the use of these devices. Currently on offer is “Fundamentals of Smart Card Technology.” This extensive course, in nine modules, will set you back $99 but it will make you better informed about the technology than, well, just about everyone else in North America (and a sizeable majority of those elsewhere). The modules are:
* Module One: Introduction to Smart Card Technology
* Module Two: Smart Card Security
* Module Three: Contactless Smart Card Technology
* Module Four: Access Control Applications
* Module Five: Biometrics
* Module Six: Public Key Infrastructure
* Module Seven: Smart Card Financial Applications
* Module Eight: Card Issuance and Personalization
* Module Nine: Smart Card Implementation
The whole course should take about 6 hours to get through, but you can stop and resume at any point. At the end of the course an automated proficiency test is administered and a certificate of completion is generated for everyone achieving a passing grade.
If this only whets your appetite for education, you’ll want to head to Grand Rapids, Mich., where Davenport University has begun to offer both 2- and 4-year programs in Biometric Security – the only school in the world to do so. (West Virginia University offers a bachelor’s of science in biometric systems that focuses on the engineering and design of biometric devices.) The program emphasizes the technology’s application in security for business or government. The Davenport students are taught how to create security systems and understand their ethics, according to Reid Gough, dean of Davenport’s School of Technology, as quoted by the Associated Press. Check out the program in detail – it just might be what you, or one of your people, need to prepare for the future.
