The Smart Payment Association announced today at the Cartes exhibition the release of the first version of their contactless data storage specifications.
In line with the Smart Payment Association mission to establish joint industry standards and to promote interoperability, this document defines how to securely store and manage data for value-added applications. The last months have seen the massive deployment of contactless payment all around the world. More than 10 million devices have been issued in the US alone (source Datamonitor, June 2006).
With the dramatic growth of this market, the need arose to add new value-added applications, such as: ticketing, access control, loyalty or personal data storage. The lack of standards is perceived as a threat to interoperability and led the Smart Payment Association to develop this new set of specifications.
The members of the association have been working on a joint specification with the objective to keep it simple and easy to implement on contactless devices at a low cost, while providing appropriate levels of security. Whenever possible, existing standards were employed. Depending on the application, three profiles have been defined: level A provides simple, read-only data storage; level B read-write data management with session authentication and level C more complex management including dynamic data creation and authentication methods. An optional level D provides full dynamic, multi-issuer, data repository management.
"The contactless data storage specifications released today demonstrate the ability of the industry to work together to propose new standards meeting issuers needs," said Jerome Ajdenbaum, President of the Smart Payment Association. "It addresses the requirements of our customers to work on interoperable standards for their deployments."